topic Re: Tracking content views in Alfresco Archive

Tracking content views

markcate — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 11:32:39 GMT

I have been searching for an Open Source Content Management System that meets several criteria. It looks like Alfresco meets all of them beautifully but one. Is there any way that I can track who has been viewing my content, and when? Specifically, we would like to post Architectural plans for our

Re: Tracking content views

andy — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 12:06:45 GMT

Hi

Audit can do this. The results may not be too easy to interpret for the read of content at the moment.

You could add audting for getting a reader for content (ie that they made the call to set up the stream to get the content of the file). This will record all access to content everywhere. Restricting the auditing of read of content by paths/id/etc is still to be done. This does not mean they actually pulled all the content, displayed it, understood it, etc.

The audit template for a file would then show who looked up the content and when.

Perhaps you want work flow where you can set a taks for someone to read the doc - it goes in their task list - and at some point they say they have done it.

Regards

Andy

Re: Tracking content views

markcate — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 12:17:49 GMT

Hey Andy,

Thank you for your quick response. I have been playing with audit, and can see that there is promise there. I have slimmed down the show_audit template and am successfully recording any changes made to the document. It isn't critical that we have a nicely formatted output on this or that it be restricted by path or user, I would be very happy with just recording all detail on what user opened the document and the time.

What I don't seem to be able to do though is to get an open for reading to trigger an audit entry. Is there an xml entry that I need to make and/or change to get this to happen?

Your idea on the workflow is also compelling. I will take a look and see if that would make sense.

Re: Tracking content views

paulhh — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 13:02:24 GMT

Also, if you get to the point where you want to have richer behaviour, you can extend Alfresco to listen to read events and do something as a side-effect. It needs Java experience. There's an example of a hit counter in the SDK that increments a count everytime a document is read - of course, it could be made to record any additional information.

Regards
Paul.

Re: Tracking content views

aatamer — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:00:31 GMT

Could you help me incorporate the content hits into my version of Alfresco?

I have downloaded the SDK into Eclipse according to the AlfrescoWiki instructions. I selected the SDKCustomAspect project and clicked Build All and it just didn't do anything. Maybe that's a problem for me to figure out more.

Assuming I get that fixed, is the SDK CustomAspect supposed to generate a JAR that I can drop into my tomcat folder on production? And with my web-client-config-custom.xml file do I need to add the property ch:contentHts as described in the Alfresco e-Book? Are there any other steps to getting the hit counter working?

Is there a central admin location where I can reset the hit counter for all documents, or can I just reset it with a SQL script?

Thanks for clarifying. This feature is critical to ours and every other website developer who needs feedback on their site's design.