Tracking Users

If you enter a value for Remote Admin/ Password in the Main properties page, then you can track the activity of users at your site.

To access the activity log, request the page UserList.htm running on your server:

http://www.yourdomain.com/UserList.htm

When prompted for authorization information, type "administrator" for the user name and type the password you entered on the Main properties page.

This will display a page that is dynamically updated to list information about the visitors who were most recently at your site. This information includes:

o Time since last page access

o Total time at your site

o User's IP address

o User's name (if you named the user in a previous session)

o Current document being viewed

o Last file requested

o Referring page that first brought the visitor to your site

If you click on the user's IP address, you will see a page that shows who owns that IP address. If you click on the current document being viewed, your browser will synchronize with the user's browser. Every time the user jumps to a new page, the page displayed on your browser will change as well.

Tracking a user's activity can be a very effective way to test your scripts with live users. By watching the way users progress through your script, you can gain information about sections of the script that are most important and you can see where users run into difficulty.

Note:  When you are synched up with a user who is running a script, it is possible for your activity to alter the way the script operates. This interference is rare and will only happen when your script displays a page containing an asynchronous EXEC command. EXEC commands are used in scripts that display dynamic images. These scripts use the EXEC command inside IMG tags to cause the user's browser to request a dynamic image from the user's session. When you are tracking a user, both your browser and the user's browser will request the same image. This condition will cause a problem only if you have designed your script to trap the image request and perform some activity other than simply generating the image.

The DecisionScript server distinguishes individual users by writing a cookie to each user's browser and by tracking each user's IP address. If a user has disabled cookies on his browser and he is going through a gateway that masks his IP address, then it might be impossible for the server to track the user. In this case, a single user's activity shows up as multiple users.