change logs for any given table

I'd like to set up a change log or logs for certain tables. The change log would ideally record who, when, and what operation. Intuitively, it seemed that the best way would be to put a trigger in to handle it, something like this:

create table smoosh with fields barf1 and barf2

create table smooshlog with fields whodidit,whatdone,whendone,barf1,barf2

create triggers:

insert into smooshlog (select user,'insert',sysdate,* from smoosh where id
= thisone)

insert into smooshlog (select user,'update',sysdate,* from smoosh where id
= thisone)

That's really bad pseudo code but you get the idea. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. SQL doesn't like to specify '*' as one of the fields. On it's own is ok. I could of course specify each field individually, but that makes maintenance a bit of a nightmare.

I can imagine some pl/sql code that builds the field list dynamically at runtime from the system tables, and generates a dynamic sql statement, but I'm just not that good....

I may be going off in the wrong direction entirely. Are there any tried-and-true methods of doing this type of thing?

---
Dennis Taylor
---
The opinions expressed herein are mine. Get your own opinions!