logging user visit

[Francis Dhaenens]

I am building an ASP application, in this application, one of the
functions is that I have to know exactly how long a user has used a
certain page of the application. so I need a way to long the time a user
enters a page and when he leaves again.

the problem is when the user closes the browser, no time for leaving is
recorded...

Is there a way to run a web service that can read cookies of all the
users and write them to a database? Or am I looking too far for the
solution.

I'd like a clean solution, not with popups, or opening other windows in
order to run extra asp code..

 

[Pete]

You could trap this *sometimes* by writing some javascript in your
pages, trapping the onBeforeUnload event and maybe posting something to
your server then.

But there are ways the user can get past this, e.g. physically bringing
down the connection before they close the browser (disconnecting the
phone line if its a dialup connection), or even (a bit extreme!) just
switching the machine off at the wall without exiting anything.

I'm fairly sure there is no 100% reliable way to achieve what you want.
You can only really record when the user comes back to your site.

HTH,
Pete

 

[CJM]

The most common approach I have come across is to track each time someone
requests a page and record it in a db. Any entries less than 20 mins old
(for default time-out settings) are considered 'live'. That is, if you can
just accept that you are potentially 20 minutes out-of-date when you query
the DB, life is a lot easier.

As Pete has stated, there is currently no guarranteed way of tracking your
users accurately.

I'm not sure if this is helpful to you... Why are you trying to track the
length of time they are on your site? Is it for billing for a provided
service? Or just for your information?

If it just informational, then my method may well be OK. If you need to be
more accurate, I think you will be disappointed..

hth

Chris

 

[Tim Williams]

Have some client side js (assuming it's enabled) make a request for an image
from your server every x minutes, or faster if you need more resolution in
your timings. Put the page name in the img url as a querystring and log it
in a db.

Tim