Diagnostics, Audit Logging and Analytics
Digitise Forms includes a facility to store tracing messages which you can browse for auditing and diagnostic purposes. The tracing messages can log errors, provide a history of what has been happening and help you diagnose problems should they occur.
Digitise Forms provides development logging within Form Studio and runtime logging for analysis of form usage and diagnostic purposes. It also allows you to connect your forms to a Google Analytics account for more in depth analysis of form usage.
Form Studio logging records events that happen whilst using Form Studio, e.g. when publishing a project. This logging is turned on and off within the Studio Settings, which also allow you to choose where you want the log to be output to and, if output to file, to specify a file name and file path for the log file.
Log messages can be saved to a file and/or be output to a third-part debug viewer, such as Microsoft's DebugView.
Different levels of tracing (errors, warnings, information messages, debug information etc.) can be selected depending upon the depth of information you need. For example, you could specify just to record error and warning messages, provide a general record of the Studio activity or produce a more detailed diagnostic (debug) log if you were to experience problems using Form Studio.
If you write the log to file, you can read it using a standard text editor, such as the Windows Notepad.
Forms Server logging provides a log of activity within the Forms Server component of a form and covers such things as licence authentication, reading and writing Datasources and use of the Capita Pay360 Elements.
This logging is turned on and off using the Form Manager.
Log messages can be can saved to a SQL Server database and/or to file and can also be output to a third-party debug viewer, such as Microsoft's DebugView.
Different levels of tracing (errors, warnings, information messages, debug information etc.) can be selected depending upon the type of messages you want to store. For example, you could specify just to record error and warning messages, provide a general record of server activity or produce a more detailed diagnostic (debug) logging if you were to experience problems using a form.
You can view the Forms Server trace log using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio or other app which can read SQL Server databases for logs written to a database or using a standard text editor, such as the Windows Notepad, for logs written to file. In addition, where you have written the log to a database, Form Manager allows you to email all or part of the log to a specified email address or output it to a CSV file, to be imported into a third-party application capable of interpreting this type of file format.
If you choose to output the log to a file, you will need to give the appropriate user write and modify access permissions to your specified log folder.
Client logging provides information about how users use your forms, for business intelligence (BI) purposes. It can tell you how long they spend on each page within a form, how long it takes for data to be read from and written to Datasources and which Events are triggered on a page. This type of logging can be used to work out how long users typically take on each page, whether users give up half way through a form, how they work through the form etc., allowing you to make judgements about such things as the efficiency and usability of your form.
This logging is turned on and off under the Forms section within the Form Manager.
The log is automatically stored in the Digitise Forms Configuration Database and can be read using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio or other app which can read SQL Server databases.
The log records the following actions:
- Authorization obtained or refused,
- Changing to different page,
- OnPageShow event,
- Element-related Events (such as Clicked, Changed etc.) for which an action has been defined;
- LoadDatasource, CreateDatasource or UpdateDatasource calls including the HTTP response status and message together with the duration,
- Start of Submit;
-
Completion of submission.
Each entry in the log carries a client timestamp including milliseconds, records the action/event performed and the object of that action e.g. the name of a button whose Clicked Event has been triggered or the name of a loaded Datasource.
In addition, each record has the following information aimed at allowing you to follow individual sessions within the log:
- Session identification number (Id),
- Session sequence number (Note that entries may not always be added to the log in sequential order. The session sequence number, therefore allows you to work out the order in which the logged actions were performed.),
- Client IP Address,
- Client user-agent,
- Authenticated user name (if available).
This logging provides a separate log which reports on the logging process itself and may be useful if you were to experience problems with logging either with the runtime Server logging or the logging within Forms Studio. By default the logging is Off for both server and Form Studio logging and we don't recommend enabling this logging unless asked to do so by NDL's Technical Support Team.
If you were to experience problems with the Forms Studio logging, and you were asked to enable the log logging, you can enable this logging within the Digitise Forms Studio Settings.
If you were to be asked to enable the Server-side log logging, you will need to manually edit the Web.config file found in the folder on the web server to which the Digitise Forms server component of your form is published. This file is a text file which can be edited with any standard text editor, such as Notepad++.
Open the file and find the line:
<add key="NLogLevel" value="Off" />
Edit this line and change "Off" to "Audit", "Debug" or "Trace" as instructed.
The logging will start immediately. Remember to reset the option back to Off when you have finished as this log file can get very large.
The log is written to the following file:
%ProgramData%\NDLFXWebApps\nloglogfile.txt
on the same machine as the Digitise Forms Server component. Once you have finished with the logging, you can delete this file.
- The same copy of the file is used by all Digitise Forms projects whose Digitise Forms Server components are published to the same web server machine. Therefore, if you enable log logging for two projects both will log to the same file.
Google Analytics relays information about how users use a web site to the central Google Analytics servers from which you can then obtain reports allowing you to analyse and evaluate your users' experiences with your web site in order to help you improve its usability and content.
In order to use Google Analytics you need to sign up to the service and create a Google Analytics account - to create an account or for more information refer to the Google Analytics web site, which at the time of writing was available at https://www.google.com/analytics.
If you have a Google Analytics account you can incorporate the Google Analytics global site tag library into your forms, so that information about how your form is used will be sent to the Google Analytics service. You can then use the separate Google Analytics tools and utilities to interrogate and analyse the collected data in the normal way.
You can do this in one of two ways:
- By providing your own HTML and JavaScript code snippet, which loads and configures the required use of the Google Analytics global site tag library. This snippet will be added, as is, to the index.html file generated for your form when you publish the form and must be complete, including your Tracking ID in the appropriate places.
- By providing your Tracking ID for the Google Analytics property to which you want to send data about your form usage. In this case, a standard section of code will be added to your form in order to load and configure the global site tag library with the supplied Tracking ID inserted in the appropriate places.
In either case, adding Google Analytics to your form is done as part of configuring the publishing profile under the Form Studio Publish option.