Recording links clicked

[tabs]

I'm looking at using a session and includes to monitor the links clicked on and the order by a user when an intranet document is used.

 

I can write the data to a test file using fopen but I need to know how to gather the data ?

 

Any ideas? Is there something similar to the onClick command in javascript that will pass a string (in this case the link name clicked) onto a function and this then writes it to the text file?

 

thanks for any help

[rhodesa]

well, no matter what you will need to use some sort of server side language here (i'm going to assume PHP)

 

for internal pages, just record $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] every time the page loads

 

for external pages, make the links go to an internal page that can then redirect like:

link.php?url=http://www.hostname.com/external/page.html

then in link.php record the value of $_GET['url']

 

is that what you are looking for? if so, this should be moved to the PHP forum

[tabs]

Cheers, yes probably needs moving to php forum.

There will be no external links used though.

[lemmin]

You can do this all client side since it is local. Do something like this:

<script>
function writeLog(link)
{
   //write link to a file
}
</script>
<a href="page.htm" onClick="writeLog(this.href)">test</a>

 

I think Scripting.FileSystemObject is what you need to write the file.

[rhodesa]

put this code in a file

<?php
  session_start();
  if(!is_array($_SESSION['pages']))
    $_SESSION['pages'] = array();
  array_unshift($_SESSION['pages'],$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
?>

 

and include it at the top of every page. it will build an array with all the pages the person has visited. The 0 index will always be the current page, 1 is the last page, 2 the second to last page, etc. So, to print the last page, after you do the include of the above code just do:

<?php
  if($_SESSION['pages'][1])
    print $_SESSION['pages'][1];
?>

[tabs]

You can do this all client side since it is local. Do something like this:

<script>
function writeLog(link)
{
   //write link to a file
}
</script>
<a href="page.htm" onClick="writeLog(this.href)">test</a>

 

I think Scripting.FileSystemObject is what you need to write the file.

 

Isn't FileSystemObject an ASP component? (probably displaying my beginner status here.)

[lemmin]

It is a windows scripting object that you have to create:

    set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");  
    set s = fso.CreateTextFile("C:\test.txt", True);
    s.writeline("HI");
    s.Close();

 

[ToonMariner]

not sure the session is actually that useful here - to record ALL data you will need to log it on every page load. This would mean writing a snippet that is included in every page that opens a file (maybe a file per user so you don't get any problems with locks) and logs the data required on a new line.

 

Client side is pointless as you won't have access to the data...

 

If your requirement is a little less strict then perhaps you could collect data in a session array and dump it say every time the array hits 5 records - may help a little on performance but lets be honest its not going to make a massive difference.