Custom Web Visitor Tracking using C#

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Introduction

When you want to collect more data about your website visitors and client platform which is not provided by IIS log files you can use this simple technique to do that. If you are able to collect the data from the server side and if you have full control over the server side page creation code probably this technique will not be required at all for you.

Background

I started this simple task when I wanted to track a web document ID which the IIS logs did not log when user is requesting the pages. (By the way our site had dynamic content in JSP, each page with unique id). Whenever a user navigates through the pages in our site we want to track the document id he / she is visiting. The collected data is stored in SQL Server.

Using the code

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/*Script for generating DB object for the sample project 
  attached. Copy paste the following  section in to your sql server
  enterprise manager and run it. */
    if exists (
        select * from dbo.sysobjects 
        where id = object_id(N'[dbo].[usr_log]') 
        and OBJECTPROPERTY(id, N'IsProcedure') = 1)
            drop procedure [dbo].[usr_log]

GO

    if exists (
        select * from dbo.sysobjects 
        where id = object_id(N'[dbo].[UsrLog]') 
        and OBJECTPROPERTY(id, N'IsUserTable') = 1)
            drop table [dbo].[UsrLog]

GO

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[UsrLog] (
 [id] [int] IDENTITY (1, 1) NOT NULL ,
 [timesmp] [datetime] NULL ,
 [Platform] [varchar] (255) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL ,
 [BrowserVersion] [varchar] (255) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL ,
 [ClrVersion] [varchar] (255) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL ,
 [IsCrawler] [varchar] (255) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL ,
 [RemoteHost] [varchar] (255) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL 
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON 
GO

SET ANSI_NULLS OFF 
GO

CREATE PROCEDURE [usr_log] 
  @Platform varchar(256),
  @BowserVersion varchar(256),
  @ClrVersion varchar(256),
  @IsCrawler varchar(256),
  @RemoteHost varchar(256)
AS
BEGIN
 insert into UsrLog (Platform, 
                     BrowserVersion,
                     ClrVersion,
                     IsCrawler,
                     RemoteHost) 
 values (@Platform , 
         @BowserVersion, 
         @ClrVersion,
         @IsCrawler, 
         @RemoteHost)
END
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF 
GO

SET ANSI_NULLS ON 
GO

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