what is the best way to capture page views per user in asp.net-mvc

Question

what is the best way to capture page views by person without slowing down performance on the site. I see that stackoverflow show page views all over the place. Are they doing an insert into a db everytime i click on a page?

In asp.net-mvc, Is there any recommended way to track page view per user (my site has a login screen) so i can review which pages people are going to and how often

Answer 1

The best way would probably be a global action filter that intercepts requests to all actions on all controllers, then increments a counter in the database for the current user and page. To save hitting the database too hard, you could cache these values and invalidate them every few minutes, depending on how much traffic you're dealing with.

Answer 2

First off.. if what you really care about is how are customers using my site then you most likely want to look into Google Analytics or a similar service.

But if you want a quick and dirty page view record and you are using ASP.Net MVC 3 then as Chris Fulstow mentioned you're going to want to use a mix of global action filters and caching. Here is an example.

PageViewAttribute.cs 

    public class PageViewAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    private static readonly TimeSpan pageViewDumpToDatabaseTimeSpan = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 10);

    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        var calledMethod = string.Format("{0} -> {1}",
                                         filterContext.ActionDescriptor.ControllerDescriptor.ControllerName,
                                         filterContext.ActionDescriptor.ActionName);

        var cacheKey = string.Format("PV-{0}", calledMethod);

        var cachedResult = HttpRuntime.Cache[cacheKey];

        if(cachedResult == null)
        {
            HttpRuntime.Cache.Insert(cacheKey, new PageViewValue(), null, DateTime.Now.Add(pageViewDumpToDatabaseTimeSpan) , Cache.NoSlidingExpiration, CacheItemPriority.Default,
                                  onRemove);
        }
        else
        {
            var currentValue = (PageViewValue) cachedResult;

            currentValue.Value++;
        }
    }

    private static void onRemove(string key, object value, CacheItemRemovedReason reason)
    {
        if (!key.StartsWith("PV-"))
        {
            return;
        }

        // write out the value to the database
    }

    // Used to get around weird cache behavior with value types
    public class PageViewValue
    {
        public PageViewValue()
        {
            Value = 1;
        }

        public int Value { get; set; }
    }
}

And in your Global.asax.cs

public class MvcApplication : HttpApplication 
{
        public static void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters)
        {
            filters.Add(new PageViewAttribute());
        }
}

For pre-ASP.Net MVC 3 ONLY you are going to have to apply the same attribute manually to all of your actions.

[PageView]
public ActionResult CallOne()
{
}

[PageView]
public ActionResult CallTwo()
{
}

Answer 3

We use the open source Piwik: http://piwik.org/, which is setup on it's own server. One line of Javascript in the _Layout page makes a call to Piwik after the page has loaded (put the JS at the end) and does not affect page load performance at all.

In addition to just counts, you'll get a ton of info about where your users are coming from, browser, screen resolutions, installed plugins. Plus you can track conversions and use the same tool to track marketing campaigns, etc.

<soapbox>

I cannot think of a situation where you'd be better off implementing this in MVC or in your web app in general. This stuff simply does not belong in your web app and is a meta-concern that should be separated out. This approach has enabled us to track analytics for all of our apps (32 of them: mvc 2/3, webforms, php...) in a unified manner.

If you really don't want to use another tool for this purpose, I would recommend tapping into your IIS log and getting your stats from there. Again, to get any real decision making power out of it, you'll need to put a good analyzer on it. I recommend Splunk: http://www.splunk.com/

</soapbox>