Tracking user navigation on a web site

Typically you put up a website and hope everything goes well and is used.  It is often a good idea to track the pages that users actually go to, and from where.  A novice developer would likely add code to every page to record this information. A better developer may add code to a master page to do the same. A better (and simpler) solution is to just drop a IHttpModule on to the website and have it record. If you produce many websites, then just compile it to a DLL and add it to each

 

The code is very simple, as shown below.

Code Snippet

1.  
2. using System;
3. using System.Web;
4. using System.Configuration;
5. using System.Data;
6.  
7. using System.Data.SqlClient;
8.  
9. public class RequestTracking : IHttpModule
10. {
11.     private HttpApplication httpApp;
12.     private string _Connection;
13.     public void Init(HttpApplication httpApp)
14.     {
15.  
16.         this.httpApp = httpApp;
17.         httpApp.BeginRequest += new EventHandler(httpApp_BeginRequest);
18.         _Connection = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["logdb"].ConnectionString;
19.     }
20.  
21.     void httpApp_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
22.     {
23.         using (var sp = new SqlCommand("sp_LogRequest", new SqlConnection(_Connection)) { CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure })
24.         {
25.             sp.Parameters.AddWithValue("RelPath", httpApp.Context.Request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath);
26.             if (httpApp.Context.Session != null)
27.             {
28.                 sp.Parameters.AddWithValue("Session", httpApp.Context.Session.SessionID);
29.             }
30.             sp.Parameters.AddWithValue("IPAddress", httpApp.Request.UserHostAddress);
31.             try
32.             {
33.                 sp.Connection.Open();
34.                 sp.ExecuteNonQuery();
35.             }
36.             catch { }
37.             finally { sp.Connection.Close(); }
38.         }
39.     }
40.     public void Dispose()
41.     { }
42. }

 

The amount of information capture is sparse:

• The requested file as a relative path
• The SessionId (if a session exists)
• The Client IP Address

You can add a lot more information if you wish. The information is inserted into a SQL with three tables, the page reference table:

• PageId Int Identity(1,1)
• PageUrl varchar(255)

The Session reference table:

• SId Int Identity(1,1)
• SessionId varchar(255)
• ClientIP  varchar(22)

And into the log table:

• LogId int Identity (1,1)
• PageId
• Sid 
• ReceivedTime Datetime

This allows you to see how long the client spent on each page, what page they go to next, etc. A useful exercise is often to create a chart of all of the pages and the percentage of time they go between each. For example, you can use Visio to generate a site map, now just add the % of times between each page to each link. The results may cause you to restructure the website or identify pages that are not being used as expected.