Question

I am building a Wiki / Blog similar application, and I have a question about the best way to store the View Count for each of the articles. The requirement is that I only want to store the unique number of users that viewed the article and not the total view count. So far I have come up with 3 different ways to accomplish:

1. SQL Server stored procedure: the problem with this approach is that the data is stored in XML data type and it might be a bit complicated to achieve the requirement using this method. I am leaving this as a last resort.

2. MSMQ: this would work great, since I can process the requests serially. The only problem with this approach is that, I cannot ensure that MSMQ is installed on the host server. This one is out of the question!

3. Using Application.Lock(): I know that using this method I can lock access to the Application object, update some entry in the application, update the database, and then call Application.Unlock(). While this sounds as a functional approach, it still feels like a workaround.

Does anyone has a suggestion on what I should do to achieve the requirement?

Answer 1

MsMQ and Application.Lock are def not the options to consider for something simple you want to do. (Application.Lock() is a def NO GO)

I also see no reason for XML. A stored proc does not rely on XML

Create a table
[page,userip]

on every view of the page

insert into <table>(page,userip) values(@page,@userip)

For the statistics just issue the a query

select count(*) from <table> group by userip having page=@page

This identifies a user on its IP, not completely failsafe as multiple users can come from the same ip.

But why not investigate google Analytics? All the info you need (and more)