Gathering a Web Site Users Information in ASP.NET

Gathering information about a Web site user is very common task for a web administrator. There are different ways to gather this information such as using log files, IIS logs etc. ASP.NET also provides classes that can be used to gather web site stats. In this article, I will show you how you can collect information about your site visitors using ASP.NET classes provided by the .NET Framework library.

In this my focus will be on one class - HttpRequest. The HttpRequest class provides properties that can be used to read the HTTP values sent by a client browser when a request is made. The HttpRequest class properties are briefly described in Table 1. As you can see from this table, you can get information about browser, application, contents, cookies, filters, headers, referrals, host and so on.

Table 1. HttpRequest class properties

AcceptTypes	Returns a string array of client-supported MIME accept types
ApplicationPath	Returns the ASP.NET application's virtual application root path on the server
Browser	Returns information about the requesting client's browser capabilities
ClientCertificate	Returns the current request's client security certificate
ContentEncoding	Returns the character set of the entity-body
ContentLength	Specifies the length, in bytes, of content sent by the client
ContentType	Returns the MIME content type of the incoming request
Cookies	Returns a collection of cookies sent by the client
CurrentExecutionFilePath	Returns the virtual path of the current request
FilePath	Returns the virtual path of the current request
Files	Returns the collection of client-uploaded files (Multipart MIME format)
Filter	Returns or sets the filter to use when reading the current input stream
Form	Returns a collection of form variables
Headers	Returns a collection of HTTP headers
HttpMethod	Returns the HTTP data transfer method (such as GET, POST, or HEAD) used by the client
InputStream	Returns the contents of the incoming HTTP entity body
IsAuthenticated	Returns a value indicating whether the user has been authenticated
IsSecureConnection	Returns a value indicting whether the HTTP connection uses secure sockets (that is, HTTPS)
Params	Returns a combined collection of QueryString, Form, ServerVariables, and Cookies items
Path	Returns the virtual path of the current request
PathInfo	Returns additional path information for a resource with a URL extension
PhysicalApplicationPath	Returns the physical file system path of the currently executing server application's root directory
PhysicalPath	Returns the physical file system path corresponding to the requested URL
QueryString	Returns the collection of HTTP query string variables
RawUrl	Returns the raw URL of the current request
RequestType	Returns or sets the HTTP data transfer method (GET or POST) used by the client
ServerVariables	Returns a collection of Web server variables
TotalBytes	Returns the number of bytes in the current input stream
Url	Returns Information about the URL of the current request
UrlReferrer	Returns information about the URL of the client's previous request that linked to the current URL
UserAgent	Returns the raw user agent string of the client browser
UserHostAddress	Returns the IP host address of the remote client
UserHostName	Returns the DNS name of the remote client
UserLanguages	Returns a sorted string array of client language preferences

The Request member of an ASP.NET web application represents the HttpRequest object. For example, if you want to know the application path, you can use the following code:
string str = Request.ApplicationPath.ToString());
In the similar fashion, you can use other properties of HttpRequest to get the information related to a request. 
Gathering Clients Information
For test this, I create a Web application and add a button and Label control to the Web page. On the button click event handler, I write the code listed in Listing 1. As you can see from this code, I create a StringBuilder object and add strings to it by using the Request object properties. I add application path, host address, referral URL, authenticated, secured connection and browser related information to StringBuilder and then display the contents of it in the Label control using the Text property.
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
builder.Append("<font face=\"verdana\" size=\"2\" >");
builder.Append("<br><b>Application Path</b>: " + Request.ApplicationPath.ToString());
builder.Append("<br><b>User Host</b>: " + Request.UserHostAddress.ToString()); builder.Append "<br><b>Referrer</b>: " + Request.UrlReferrer.ToString());
builder.Append("<br><b>Is Authenticated</b>: " +Request.IsAuthenticated.ToString()); 
builder.Append("<br><b>Is Secure</b>: " + Request.IsSecureConnection.ToString());
builder.Append("<br><b>Operating System:</b>: " + Request.Browser.Platform);
builder.Append( "<br><b>Browser</b>: " + Request.Browser.Browser);
builder.Append( "<br><b>Browser Version:</b>: " + Request.Browser.Version);
builder.Append("</font>");
Lable1.Text = builder.ToString();
Looping through Server Variables
The ServerVariables property returns a NameValueCollection object. You can read all server variables by looping through this collection as you can see from the following code:
NameValueCollection coll = null;
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
// Load ServerVariable collection into NameValueCollection object.
coll = Request.ServerVariables;
// Get names of all keys into a string array.
String[] arr1 = coll.AllKeys;
for (int i = 0; i < arr1.Length; i++)
{
builder.Append("Key: " + arr1[i] + "<br>");
String[] arr2 = coll.GetValues(arr1[i]);
for (int j = 0; j < arr2.Length; j++)
{
builder.Append("Value " + j + ": " + arr2[j] + "<br>");
}
}
Label1.Text = builder.ToString();
In the above code, I loop through all server variables provided by HttpRequest.Variables member and read them in a StringBuilder object. After that I simply display the contents of StringBuilder in a Label control using Label1.Text = builder.ToString();
Conclusion
Even though, HttpRequest class does not provide every little thing you need to know about your web site visitors but I am sure it provide enough functionality to find out who is visiting your web site, where are they coming from, and what operating system and browser they are using. In this article, we saw some of this functionality.
If you are interested in gathering more information such as downloads, pages, and files, you may want to look at the log files. You need to contact your system administrator to find out the correct path of the logs files. Once you know the correct path, you can open these log files (these files are text files) and parse them based on the information you are looking for.