[WEB4LIB] capturing form data

[Thomas Dowling]

At 09:28 AM 2/12/2002, Jeff Wisniewski wrote:

>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?

A lot may depend on whether you created your forms with a method of GET or 
POST.  If GET, the variables sent by the form are included in the "action" 
URL's query string--the part after the question mark--and should be in your 
server logs.  If POST, the variables sent by the form are provided as 
standard input to the action URL, and are probably not logged by the web 
server; whether or not they're logged by the Perl script you post to is a 
question for your developers.

If the information you want is being logged somewhere, the questions you're 
asking are probably just too specific for any off-the-shelf log analysis 
tool, but will be a piece of cake for a short Perl script.



Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu