Reporting for a web site can be as simple as you would like, or as complex as building the Empire State Building, and the ways to go about it are about as varied as anything out there. For the sake of time, and to keep you from being buried, we'll stick to a fairly simple approach, but we'll also touch upon some other suggestions and ideas.
To start off, we need to decide what exactly it is that we want to report on. A few simple, key items should be enough to get you started. In our site, let's track the page that's visited, when it's visited, and some basic browser information from the user. For this we will need to store this data someplace and our database is perfect. Let's create ourselves a new table, calling it SiteStats
, with the following setup:
Like most of the pieces we've done to this point, we will need to create both a DAL and BLL for handling our data. As we're taking a very simplistic approach to our reporting, we'll go with a small, object-based system like we did...