Laravel Nova Actionable trait for non-nova events

Had the same question as well and could not find anything regarding this in Nova documentation.

Digging around in Nova vendor files I found the Laravel\Nova\Actions\ActionEvent class which seems to be what Nova uses when saving entries to the action log.

You'll find some methods like forResourceCreate($user, $model) and forResourceUpdate($user, $model) which can be used for saving action log entries on model updates and saves.

There's some more methods to handle other cases but I haven't dug any further on those.

Do note tho, that you'll have to pass the Model that has been changed/pending creation to the ActionEvent class before saving it, otherwise it seems it can't extract what has changed so Original/Changes will be empty.

Below is an example snippet you can try to run ie. via php artisan tinker that will update the name on a User and log the changes to the action log.

Note that you'll have to create 2 users with id=1 and id=2 where user with id=2 is the one that will be logged as having changed user with id=1

auth()->loginUsingId(2);
$user = \App\User::find(1);
$user->name .= ' 2.0';
// Create ActionEvent instance before saving so Original/Changes is set correctly in action log
$actionEvent = \Laravel\Nova\Actions\ActionEvent::forResourceUpdate(auth()->user(), $user);
if ($user->save()) {
    // User model saved successfully so save entry in action log
    $actionEvent->save();
}

I'm not sure if this is the correct way but hopefully above should be a step in the right direction at least.

I've only tried and got it working using Nova v2.0.9 on Laravel 5.8.

@gudorian Thanks for your fair explanation. As an update to Nova v3, we can now use this

Laravel\Nova\Nova::actionEvent()->forResourceUpdate($user, $model)->save();