Question

I would like to put in some place some very basic web tracking for my MVC application. I’d like to do this on the server side and I am wondering if anyone has any knowledge of some simple classes that I could use to help me with this.

I’d like to track the following things: The User’s IP Address, What page they requested, and what country they are from, as well as the DateTime stamp.

Answer 1

Yes, you can intercept this in the controller for each request:

If you want the page the user requested:

Request.RawUrl //Gives the current and complete URL the user requested

If you want the Country it was requested from, you can get the IP address of the user and then use a ready-made function to look up where it’s from:

Request.UserHostAddress

You can also get all the route values the user has passed in; to get a more complete picture of how they got to where they are.

public class MyController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Home()
    {
        var userIP = Request.UserHostAddress;
        var requestedUrl = Request.UserHostAddress;
        var routeValues = this.ControllerContext.RouteData.Route.GetRouteData(HttpContext);
        var requestedDateTime = DateTime.Now;
    }
}

Now, you’d have to put this on each action, and that seems silly, so why not have this happen for everything that’s executed?

protected virtual void OnActionExecuting(
    ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
{
    var userIP = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.UserHostAddress;
    var requestedUrl = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.UserHostAddress;
    var routeData = ((MvcHandler)filterContext.HttpContext.CurrentHandler).RequestContext.RouteData.Route.GetRouteData(filterContext.HttpContext);
    var requestedDateTime = DateTime.Now;

}