track user clik on links

jaggs79

hai ! i am a new learner, iam working on a web based application for bioinformatics. my application has only two web pages which display the links to specific category based on the users search key. The user's selection on this page leads hin to a page where all the links under that category are displayed.the links here take him to the actual location of the information.
so far i got a perl script do the background work of extracting links from a website.
i cannot figure out how can we trap the choice of user oh the first page, will session variables do the trick?

Advance thanks to anyone who can help me get started by writing sample code that will solve my problem.

noimad1

I think you are going to have to explain a little bit better what exactly you are trying to do here?

As I understand it you have two pages - the First with a list of categories, which the user can click on to get to the second page, which has all of the links to other pages under that category?

So what do you mean by "Trap" the users choice from the first page?

Do you want to store the category he clicked on somewhere for your own records?

Or do you need to know which category he clicked on for when he goes on to the next pages?

Sorry, I'm just a little confused on what you are wanting to do.

jaggs79

noimad1 , i will explain clearly. the second page is comon to all the links,ie if you click on any link you will go to the same page but the information on the second page will be displayed based on your choice on the second page.evrything is dynamic, ie based on the users choice.the first page is generated based on the users search key word.i think i made myself clear.
i need to know the users choice for generating the second page correctly

noimad1

Ok, I think that makes sense. I just wasn't positive what you were going to use it for.

You could use session variables to store this information.

You could start a session, define the variable, then you would need to change how your links are displayed on the screen. They would need to be displayed in php so you could do something like this:

echo "<a href=\"link.php\" onClick=\"<?php sess_variable=\"yourtrackingcode\";?>\"<b>Click Here for Link </b></a>";

That way your session variable would be set when they click on the button.l

If you don't want to have to echo out the php <a href> information you could just do this:

Make your link like this: <a href ="yourlink.php?track_code=yourtrackingcode>Link</a>

Then use the $_REQUEST[track_code]; on the yorulink.php and asign its value to a session variable on yourlink.php page.