Favourites and recently opened

Overview

Star an object and it appears on your favourites list. Open one and it appears on your recent list. Both are yours alone, and neither changes the object.

A consuming app gets two chips on an index page for the cost of two query parameters. dossiq's Cases page and a zaakafhandelapp work list want the same two lists, so they live here rather than once per app.

Why the state sits beside the object

A star is a fact about a person, not about the object. Write it into the object and every star cuts a version and adds an audit entry, so a case a hundred people find interesting carries a hundred revisions that say nothing about the case.

So a star lives in its own table, openregister_favourites, keyed by user and object. Unstarring deletes the row. Deleting an object clears its stars. Objects live in per-schema tables, so no foreign key can cascade from them and a listener does the work instead.

Recently opened comes from the audit trail

Opening an object already writes a read entry on the audit trail, with you and the moment. Your recent list is read straight from those entries. There is no second table to keep in step.

The list holds distinct objects, newest first, up to a hundred. Open a case five times and it shows once, with the time of your last open. The audit trail keeps all five entries.

Only what you opened counts

Code also reads objects on your behalf: a permission check before an upload, the relations tab of a case you already opened, a lookup of the client a case points to, an assistant answering your question. Those reads still go on the audit trail, with the cause lookup. Your recent list leaves them out, so it shows the objects you opened and not the ones the code looked at for you.

Reads made inside an import, a rule, a migration or a scheduled job keep their own cause and stay out of your list too.

A view is not a read state. A read state records that nothing changed since you looked, and the next write clears it. See Object read state.

When the audit trail is off

An administrator can switch the audit trail off with the retention setting auditTrailsEnabled. Your recent list is then empty, and the response says why. OpenRegister keeps no shadow log to fill it.

The AVG processing log is separate. It records reads of personal data for accountability, whatever the audit setting says, and it is never used for your recent list.

The API

Verb	Path	What it does
PUT	/api/objects/{register}/{schema}/{id}/favourite	Stars it for you. Starring twice is starring once
DELETE	/api/objects/{register}/{schema}/{id}/favourite	Removes your star, and nobody else's

There is no GET here, because every object read already carries @self.favourite for the reader. A detail page renders the star from data it has, and a list renders a column of them from one query. The marker is omitted entirely for an anonymous read, where there is no "you" to answer for.

Opening an object records the read. No call is needed.

The two lenses

A list takes _favourite=true or _recent=true. Both are resolved inside the query, so the page, the total and the facets see one restriction.

GET /api/objects/cases/case?_favourite=true&status=open
GET /api/objects/cases/case?_recent=true&_limit=10

Each composes with every other filter, so "my starred open cases" is one query and not two. _recent=true orders by when you last opened each object, newest first, unless you ask for an order of your own.

On a _recent=true page every object carries @self.viewedAt, the moment you last opened it in ISO 8601. The response says whether the lens could answer:

{
  "results": [
    { "@self": { "id": "…", "viewedAt": "2026-10-09T10:15:00+00:00" } }
  ],
  "@self": { "lenses": { "recent": { "available": true, "reason": null } } }
}

When available is false the page is empty and reason is one of audit-trail-disabled, anonymous or read-history-unavailable.

A search over several schemas or registers, or over none, answers the lens the same way: the same order, the same paging and the same @self.viewedAt.

An anonymous caller asking for either gets an empty page. A lens over nothing answers nothing, never the whole register.

Adding the chips to an app

Three chips on an index page, with no code in the consuming app:

{
  "chips": [
    { "label": "Mine", "query": { "owner": "@me" } },
    { "label": "Favourites", "query": { "_favourite": true } },
    { "label": "Recent", "query": { "_recent": true } }
  ]
}

Render the star itself from @self.favourite, and write it with the two verbs above.

Specification

openspec/changes/archive/2026-10-05-favourites-and-recent/ and openspec/changes/archive/2026-10-30-read-history-on-audit-trail/ and openspec/changes/archive/2026-10-30-recently-opened-means-opened/, in the object-interactions capability.