The Electronic Journal service uses a journal record to log an individual request or the response to a request. A journal record consists of a string of bytes containing data about the request or response formatted in a certain way. Each journal record has a unique record number, which the Electronic Journal service maintains. Record numbers always increase but not always incrementally.
The application determines what data the service places in the record and when the service creates or updates the record. For example, an implementation may specify that the Electronic Journal service logs when a Web service starts and creates another record when it finishes. The implementation could also simply update the request record with the response data instead of creating a response record. Note that the Electronic Journal service only supports creating and updating records. It does not support deleting them.