I have a rails application for a research group and the data just grows.
One requested feature in the application is to provide a way to track
the changes made in the data. I have used PaperTrail for this and is
quite efficient for just tracking the changes.
The problem I am in is that there needs to be a way to download the data
at a particular instance and share this URL so that other researchers
can view at the exact same data. I am completely lost at how to achieve
this functionality. Additionally, the models have some associations
between them.
For eg:
Models: Coral, Observation, Measurement, Location
They have a number of associations like many-to-many, one-to-many etc.
Questions
- How can I version the database so that there can be a URL which
points to the exact data during that version ? - Should I create an API for that ?
Please help me 
Regards
Suren