Download tracking

[DaggerLily]

Hi,

I have various downloads offered to the site's users. You must be registered and logged in to get to the download page. I would like to track who is downloading each file. Therefore, I would like to insert their user id from the session variable and the id of the file. But I'm not sure how to get this to happen from a download link. Is there a way for a form to be the start of a download?

I hope this is making sense. Thanks.

[Jasp182]

Instead of linking directly to the file to be downloaded, link to a page that does the processing and then redirect to the file. So, you can have something like download_file.php that will grab the user's information from the session object, grab the file id from the URL (download_file.php?file_id=12345), do the necessary processing (insert record, validate user's access, etc) and then on success use

header('Location: '.$path_of_file);
exit;

to serve the file for downloading.

[DaggerLily]

OK - I'm being really dumb here - but I can see how to insert when I'm using a form. But can I just insert "behind the scenes" without having a form on the page?

Really, really dumb, I know.

[Jasp182]

DaggerLily wrote:

OK - I'm being really dumb here - but I can see how to insert when I'm using a form. But can I just insert "behind the scenes" without having a form on the page?

Really, really dumb, I know.

I assume you mean inserting a record into a db table? Please be more specific.

[DaggerLily]

Yes, inserting the record that will have the member's session info and the download file id.

Sorry didn't mean to be vague.

[Jasp182]

if the member's info is in the session, you can get it on any page that calls session_start(). If you have a dedicated table for this information, you can do this on the download processing page. It would go something like this.

1. Link to the processing page with the file id in the URL (ex: href="download_file.php?file_id=12345"). If you want to hide the file id, you can use a form (with method="post") and post a hidden field with the file id in it:

<form method="post" action="download_file.php">
<input type="hidden" name="file_id" value="<?=$file_id;?>">
.
.

2. On download_file.php, you can then get the user's id and credentials and do whatever you want with them.
3. When you have confirmed that the download is ok, you can use something like the following.

$query = 'INSERT INTO file_downloads SET user_id='.$SESSION['user_id'].', file_id='.$GET['file_id'];

and then of course, run the query. =]