Pointers for Custom Sitecore Analytics - analytics

I am trying to do some very basic analytics on an existing sitecore site. All i need to find is basic behavior (page views, time on page) about logged in user. For instance, I need to be able to see which pages a particular logged in user has viewed, and how long he/she stayed on that page.
I am using Sitecore 6.4, is this possible?
If so, what is the preferred way to go about doing this?

The way that Sitecore's analytics work isn't quite like you might imagine. It's really not designed to do reporting on specific users without some configuration on your part. Basically it means that you have to set up their username to be captured.. which is probably easiest to do by assigning a tag to their session. From there, there are things like the session reports and then you can pull up all the sessions for that tag (username). This is something that you will probably have to spend some time and some trial and error to do... but it is possible.. just not necessarily an out of the box report.

Related

DNN 9 restrict a logged in user to a single session at any one time

I want to be able to make it so a registered user can only be logged into the DNN site from one device/browser at any one time.
I understand that the DNN core doesn't support sessions but does have a a users online table which is checked by the scheduler, however i have been unable to find anything available to use this method.
The main purpose is to stop a paid user from sharing their login details with multiple people and thereby diluting the potential revenue to the site. I would think this was not a unique use case and someone must have dealt with this previously.
Open to any and all ideas including commercial modules.
I suppose that you could create a custom login module, and reject logins from a user who appear as active in the UsersOnline table.
I haven't looked around to see what methods are available, but the old usersonline module should provide some hints.

What is the best tool to analyse individual user?

There are lots of tool to analyse a segment of unknown users, eq: Google Analytics, Flurry. But my case is different, my user pool is limited and registered. And i need to make an overview about what a user in our app. The closest thing i can find is the user explorer feature of Google Analytics, but it list the user's action step by step, which is too detailed. i want to how much time the user sent on a page, or how many time the user trigger a feature. Do you have any suggestion?
KISSmetrics should solve your problems.

Easy Admin panel with Rails

I have created a web page with RoR and i am using auth system that i wrote. Now i would like to create an admin panel, where i can see the user info etc..
I am not sure but what i though is to add a column name to auth system like admin? giving a default name false. Then if the admin? is true admin panel opens instead of the web page login.
I wonder if i can use the same auth system so in order to login to page it logs in to admin panel.
But in the controller it will check if admin? is true for every user, i am not sure about the burden in terms of the system requirments as it will check every user.
And i know there are other gems for admin panel but its fine i can design it. I am just not sure which way is the efficient way.
The burden on the system will be negligible. It depends a little bit upon how your auth system is configured, but I am assuming that you give the user a token when he/she is properly logged in.
When the user first tries to sign in, you should check if they are an admin. At this point, if they are, then you can sign them in as an admin, also storing that information in the session. You should perform this check on the controller actions where they need to be an admin. It will not affect performance to any noticeable degree and is important for the security of your site.
Also, you may want to check out the CanCanCan gem, which is a fork of CanCan built by Ryan Bates, for an example of how this works. Unless you're building the application for educational purposes, I highly recommend the CanCanCan gem.
Hope this helps!
In addition to that, you may try Rails_Admin, which provides an easy-to-use interface for managing your data.
And I've considered to use this gem for my project, which is a huge database, so it seems to very helpful.

Access VisualForce Page without salesforce account

I'd like to create visualforce page that inserts a record into salesforce account object. However, I expect some of the page users won't have salesforce accounts. Can they still access it? If not, what are the alternatives that can be used to visualforce page in this case? (Please don't consider Web to Lead Forms).
Thanks,
Yes, it's possible. Go read about Salesforce Sites. For a start:
http://wiki.developerforce.com/page/Websites
http://wiki.developerforce.com/page/An_Introduction_to_Force.com_Sites
(of course it's also possible to write that page in say Java/.NET/PHP and use integration via SOAP or REST to talk to Salesforce... but these 2 main links will keep the whole solution within SF so no need to need to learn new language, have extra maintenance effort etc)
Sites are VF pages that expose a bit of your company's data without need to log in. You can use them to input data too, just remember that in theory anybody could learn the link and spam you (not too different from web2lead, inbound email handlers etc). You specify security in a way similar to Profiles, the records will have "Created By = {site name} Guest User".
I don't think there's anything out of the box to restrict visibility, they're open to whole world. So if you would want something similar to login IP ranges (so only sales reps from your office's network can enter data) - you might have to write some logic in the controller.

How to I access reports programmatically in SalesForce using Apex

I'm trying to write an app on the SalesForce platform that can pull a list of contacts from a report and send them to a web service (say to send them an email or SMS)
The only way I can seem to find to do this is to add the report results to a newly created campaign, and then access that campaign. This seems like the long way around.
Every post I read online says you can't access the reports through Apex, however most or all of these posts were written before Version 20 of the API was released last month, which introduced a new report object. I can now programmatically access info about a report (Such as the date last run etc) but I still can't seem to find a way to access the result data contained in that report.
Does anyone know if there's a way to do that?
After much research into it, I've discovered the only way to do this at the moment is indeed to scrape the CSV document. I would guess that Conga etc are using exactly this method.
We've been doing this for a while now, and it works. The only caveats are:
Salesforce username / password /
security token has to be shared to
the app connecting. If the password
changes (and by default it is changed
every 30 days or so) the token also
changes and must be re-entered.
You have to know the host of the account, which can be difficult to
get right. For instance while most european accounts would use emea.salesforce.com to access CSV, our account uses na7 (North America 7) even though we're located in
ireland. I'm currently sending the page host to the app and parsing it
to calculate the correct subdomain to use, but I think there has to be a
better way to do this.
Salesforce really needs to sort this out by supplying an API call which allows custom report results to be exported on the fly and allowing us to use OAuth to connect to it. But of course, this is unlikely to happen.
In the SalesforceSpring 11 update, it seems you can obtain more informations about the Reports:
As stated in the API for Report and ReportType, you can access via Apex the fields used in the query by the Report, reading the field "columns", as well as the field used to represent the filters called "filter".
Iterating through this objects, should allow you to build a String representing the same query of the Report. After building that string you can make a dynamic query with a Database.query(..) call.
It seems to be a little messy, but should work.. (NOT TESTED YET!)
As header states, this works only with Custom Reports!
Just to clarify for fellow rookies who will find this, when the question was asked you could access your report data programatically, but you had to use some hacky, error prone methods.
This is all fixed, you can now access your reports via the API as of Winter '14.
Documentation here - http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api_analytics/index.htm
Go to town on those custom dashboards etc. Cross posted from the Salesforce Stack Exchange - https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/337/can-report-data-be-accessed-programatically/
But Conga (appextremes) do this in their QuickMerge product, where the user specifies the report Id, and the apex script on the page runs the report to extract the results for a mail merge operation.
the v20.0 API added metadata about the reports, but no way to actually run the report and obtain the results. If this is a standard report, or a report you've defined, you can work out the equivalent SOQL query for your report and run that, but if its an end user defined report, there's no way to do this.

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