in reply to Tracking users clicks throughout an application

What you want to do is more complicated than you think if you want the information to be useful and accurate. I highly recommend Google Analytics or something instead. To track clicks you need JavaScript and with different browsers, possible interference from other JS libs, rich content, robot detection, and so on, there is just no way you will come anywhere close to correct/fully-covered on it.

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Re^2: Tracking users clicks throughout an application
by Anonymous Monk on May 06, 2015 at 15:48 UTC
    I will try to use Perl to develop this, by passing parameters around when the user clicks in some link.
    You are saying that it's not a good idea? Has anyone done it in Perl?
[reply]

      Lots of devs have done it in Perl. I’ve done it in Perl and in JS. I’ve done lots of things that are easy to knock-out a decent prototype but cannot compare in the slightest to a professional package sustained by hundreds of thousands of users and teams of dedicated devs. For example, at work my old boss used to brag about how our site had 10 million page views a month via pure Perl tracking. I was very skeptical and insisted we try Analytics. When we finally started tracking it with a real tool it turned out that more than 9 million of the views were robots, spam bots, and spiders; and internally fired checks which were underestimated.

      If you just want to track internal app usage and you are using code based on a framework with a central controller/dispatcher like Catalyst you can easily route internal nav information to a DB or flat file or whatever. Sessioning is not completely meaningful here as some clients don’t keep state/cookies. If your app is facing the Internet, the quality of your data will be low. If you’re doing internal/intranet and your site uses no rich content, you could be fine with this approach… depending on what you want to do with it.

      So, what do you want to do with it? Where is it? What framework are you using?

[reply]
        I forgot to mentioned that this tracking code will be for internal usage, I don't need to be so crazy about it.
[reply]
        Thank you!

        My framework is Perl. So you are saying do not use JS? What about CGI::Session? Have you done this in Perl?
[reply]

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