ffmike-user_event_logger

UserEventLogger

This plugin is extracted from several applications where I had similar problems: tracking various things that users did within the application. For example, I've used this to be able to log outgoing clicks without hooking up an analytics package, to count the number of times an ad was displayed, or to keep track of how often a particular page was visited.

To use the plugin, you must first create the table that it uses:

./script/generate user_event_logger add_event_table rake db:migrate

After that, you can add information to the table from either your controllers or your views:

log_user_event "In controller", "http://example.com", "27" <%= log_user_event "In view", "http://example.com", "27" %>

The first argument is the event name, which is required. The second is the destination URL, which is optional. The third is arbitrary extra data, which is optional. The extra data is stored in a text column, so you can add as much as you want here.

Reporting is left as an exercise for the user. The events table has these columns:

create_table :events do |t| t.column :source_url, :string t.column :destination_url, :string t.column :remote_ip, :string t.column :logged_at, :datetime t.column :extra_data, :text t.column :event_type, :string end

Example

To do outgoing link tracking, you can set up a controller method similar to this one:

def send_to @advertiser = Advertiser.find(params[:id]) destination_url = @advertiser.website.sub(/^www/, "http://www") log_user_event "Clicked through", destination_url, params[:id] redirect_to destination_url end

Gem installation

If you are running rails 2.1 or above you can choose between a standard plugin install and a gem install. To install as a gem, add this to your environment.rb file:

config.gem 'ffmike-user_event_logger', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'

and then run:

rake gems:install

Copyright (c) 2008 Michael A. Gunderloy, released under the MIT license