[WEB4LIB] capturing form data

[Chris Gray]

No, standard server logs don't capture this kind of information.

You need click-through tracking which you can do in PHP.  The basic
procedure is to set up a database table that can hold all the raw data
from a form submission and every time someone submits form data you insert
that data along with a timestamp and some CGI environment information (the
user's ip, refering page, etc) and cookie data if you're maintaining
session information.

You might want to have a look at Philip Greenspun's chapter on
User-Tracking at: http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/user-tracking

Chris Gray
Library Systems
University of Waterloo


On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Jeff Wisniewski wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> We recently implemented a new books list service that allows users to
> select subject area and some sorting and limiting parameter via an
> online form, and generate a list of new materials purchased. Use use PHP
> to talk to a mySQL database, with a lot of Perl to pull data from an
> Oracle database that populate the mySQL.
> 
> My question is: how can we go about capturing and analyzing data on the
> choices that users are making i.e. how many times has this subject been
> selected versus this subject? Is this submitted data logged in the
> server logs? We've analyzed our logs using webtrends and can get
> standard stats (hits, views, visitor sessions, etc. ) on the form page
> itself, but as of yet haven't figured out how to get at what users are
> submitting. Do we need to use more sophisticated log analysis software?
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Jeff Wisniewski
> Web Services Librarian
> University Library System
> University of Pittsburgh
> 
>