Dont Trust This Guy why not take my word for it? A blog by Jim Jeffers

I recently coded a basic statistics applicaiton for a client that offers a website affiliate program. I thought it might be worth sharing how easy it is to code this type of software in Rails. Keep in mind this is extremely basic but never the less a good illustration of how to tackle a cumbersome project relatively easily.

Decide what to track.

For this client all we needed to track were the number of actual page impressions, the amount of clicks, and the actual amount of unique visitors going to a specific users account.

Playing Big Brother.

Watching visitor activity and logging it is easy. I created a model for hits, clicks, and visits. There is a parent model to all of these called ‘User’. So here’s how I broke down the relationships:

• Hits belong to users.
• Visits belong to users.
• Clicks belong to both users and visitors.

Below is the code that logs the click through information and sends the user off on their happy way. It basically takes an id and a path so a typical link would look like: http://www.domain.com/send_to/id/encoded_url_path_to_redirect_to

  def send_to

    if @user = User.find(:first, :conditions => ["name=?",@params[:id].to_s.upcase])

      # Get parameter info...
      url = params[:path].to_s
      ip = request.remote_ip

      # Log the click information.
      click = Click.new
      click.url = url
      @user.clicks < < click

      # Log the visitor information.
      visitor = Visitor.create_if_new_today(ip,@user.id)
      visitor.clicks < < click

      # Log the hit.
      hit = Hit.new
      @user.hits < < hit

      if @user.save
        redirect_to url
      end

    end

It should be worth noting that I’ve decided to track where every click is redirecting too. I’ve also decided to track every click as a hit for the user as well as technically it is an impression.

Logging unique visitor information as well as the page impression itself (the hit) is easy too as seen below.

  def index

    if params[:id] == 'nonexistent'
      params[:id] = 'admin'
    end

    if @user = User.find(:first, :conditions => ["name=?",params[:id].to_s.upcase])
      # Log the hit.
      hit = Hit.new
      @user.hits < < hit

      # Log the visitor information.
      ip = request.remote_ip
      visitor = Visitor.create_if_new_today(ip,@user.id)
      @user.visitors < < visitor

      @time = Time.now
      @user_id = params[:id].to_s.upcase

  	else
  	  redirect_to(:controller => 'show', :id =>'nonexistent')
  	end

  end

Grabbing the stats.

Once you’ve logged the stats pulling them via rails is a piece of cake. I wrote a protected function inside of my report controller to pull the hits, clicks, and visits for a specific time length and return them in a hash.

  # Display user stats.
  def report
    @time = Time.now
    @user = User.find(session[:user_id])
    @todays = stats(@user,1.days.ago)
    @last_weeks = stats(@user,1.weeks.ago)
    @last_months = stats(@user,4.weeks.ago)
    @records = transactions
  end

  protected

  # Generates a hash containing hits, visitors, and clicks from the past.
  def stats(user,time)
    clicks = user.clicks.find(:all, :conditions => ["created_on > ?", time])
    hits = user.hits.find(:all, :conditions => ["created_on > ?", time])
    visitors = user.visitors.find(:all, :conditions => ["created_on > ?", time])
    return { :hits => hits, :visitors => visitors, :clicks => clicks }
  end