Developer’s Guide

8-14 Developer’s Guide
Monitoring your site
The FileMaker Pro Web Companion generates three types of log
files that you can use for gathering information about web users who
visit your site:
• access.log
• error.log
• info.log
For information on enabling log files, see “Setting Web Companion
configuration options” on page 8-3.
In addition, the Web Companion provides several external functions
for monitoring activity with your databases, which can be used in
your calculation fields and scripts.
Using the access.log file
The access.log file keeps a record of every time someone accesses
the Web Companion from a web browser and lists the hits in NCSA/
CERN-compatible Common Log Format.
When you enable the Access Log File option in the Web Companion
Configuration dialog box, the Web Companion generates an access.log
file and places it in the root level of the FileMaker Pro folder.
Every time a web user accesses your database, the Web Companion
continuously adds entries to the access.log file.
Note Neither the entries nor the file are automatically deleted, and so
the file may become very large. To save hard disk space on your host
computer, consider archiving the access.log file on a regular schedule.
The Common Log Format used for the access.log file is:
remotehost rfc931 authuser [date] “request” status bytes
Where Means this
remotehost The remote IP address or hostname
rfc931 Required for UNIX systems
authuser The user name authenticated by the web user
[date] The date and time of the request
“request” The request line exactly as it came from the client
status The HTTP status code returned to the client (for information,
see the World Wide Web Consortium’s web site at
www.w3c.org)
bytes The content length of the document transferred to the client
Using the error.log file
The error.log file, stored in the root level of the folder containing the
database, is generated by the Web Companion whenever any unusual
errors have occurred. Common errors reported to the web user, such
as “Database not open,” are not recorded in the error.log file.
[08/Jun/1999:16:16:01:53 –0800] Web Security database not open.
Security disabled.
[12/Jul/1999:06:07:02 –0800] ERROR: 6. Could not find email format file.
[23/Jul/1999:11:12:38 –0800] ERROR: 12: Badly formatted URL.