[RESOLVED] Logging pages visited

jasonyoung

This seems like the simplest of tasks, but I think there must be an easier way.

I've completed the majority of my site -- it's fully functional but aesthetically lacking. Before I get into dressing it up I decided it would be helpful to track what users are doing. In its simplest form, I'm tracking users who query, create or update/modify accounts. I want to expand on this tracking to include which pages they are visiting. This is only to validate the usefulness of the pages they can choose from.

I've passed this var to each page so I know who they are.

$logname = $_SESSION['logname'];

but how can I get the page captured?

Also, my page names are cryptic, not by design, just helpful for me to keep it straight. I figured I could make a single include file, drop the script in there and then apply the include to the pages I want tracked.

Any ideas???

sneakyimp

the superglobal variable $_SERVER is useful for finding out things like the filename of the current script requested, the contents of the query string, and other stuff:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.php#reserved.variables.server

If you just want to know which files get requested, you could look at your web server access log. or you could use a program like webalizer to analyze it for you to give you a high level summary of the traffic to your site.

if you are trying to track where individual users go, you'll probably need to write some information to a log or enter records into a database table. i prefer using a database table and doing something like including this file:

<?
// ** access_tracker.php **
$current page = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
$user = $_SESSION['logname'];

// make a record in my database:
$sql = "INSERT INTO access_log SET page='" . mysql_real_escape_string($current_page) . "', user='" . mysql_real_escape_string($user) . "'";
mysql_query($sql)
  or die('query to log page access failed');
?>

then i can run queries on the database to tell me how many times a particular page was accessed....something like this:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM access_log GROUP BY page

jasonyoung

Perfect. Thanks a million. This is EXACTLY what I was looking to do! You couldn't have been more on track w/ my idea.

sneakyimp

glad i could help.

one thing to keep in mind is that the vars in $_SERVER generally refer only to the originally requested file and not to any php files or templates that may be included by the original script.

in other words, if you visit http://mydomain.com/script.php and script.php includes other_script.php and then outputs a header using header_include.php then the approach I suggested above would just record accesses to script.php - EVEN IF you included access_tracker.php in each of those files.

does that make sense?

In other words, suppose your files looked like this:

 // ** script.php **
include('access_tracker.php'); // this is the first code above that writes the database
include('other_script.php');

 // ** other_script.php **
include('access_tracker.php'); // this is the first code above that writes the database
// blah blah...perform some crazy calculation
include('header_include.php');

 // ** header_include.php **
include('access_tracker.php'); // this is the first code above that writes the database
// OUTPUT PAGE HEADER HTML HERE

then each time access_tracker.php runs (3 times) it would record a request to script.php and not the other two files.