Setting cs-username from an ASP.NET site

[Sean Carpenter]

I'm currently in the process of rewriting a site that uses Classic ASP to
ASP.NET 2.0. The old site uses an ISAPI filter to put a custom
application-defined value in the cs-username field of the IIS log file.
This is then used by a traffic-tracking application to track a user's path
through the site.

Is there any way to populate this field from ASP.NET? I know I could still
use an ISAPI filter, but I'd like to use a managed solution if possible. I
have the application-defined value in the ASP.NET code - I guess I could put
it in a cookie and have IIS log cookies, but that will take some changes to
the traffic application to parse the value out of the cookie instead of just
getting it from the cs-username field.

Thanks for any help,
Sean Carpenter

 

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Hello Sean,

As for request URL intercepting and logging, I still recommend you remain
the ISAPI filter approach. This is because though ASP.NET also provide
managed request processing pipeline which allow us to intercept and
preprocess requests(through httpmodules), it can not intercept all the
request paths, those request path without a definite document extension(
such as Htttp://servername/appname/subdir/ ) can not be intercepted by
ASP.NET module, thus ISAPI will be more appropriate for your scenario.

AS for setting cs-username field of IIS log, I'm wondering how are you
doing it in your ISAPI filter, are you using any built-in components or any
3rd party log parsing and writing component? Based on my research, IIS
has provided a built-in loggin utility for accessing IIS log file(mentioned
in the below blog article):

http://blogs.msdn.com/robert_mcmurray/archive/2006/03/27/562127.aspx

since this component is a COM object, we can directly add reference to it
and use it in .net managed code through COM interop. Also, if your
currently used IIS log processing component is also based on COM, it can
also be used in managed code through COM interop. So far, there is not
built-in .net component which can directly manipulate IIS log , and IIS log
is highly restricted resources and generally ASP.NET worker process
identity won't have permission to access it.

Please feel free to post here if there is anything I missed or any other
information you wonder.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Sean Carpenter]

Steven -

Thanks for the advice. It seems like the ISAPI route will still be the
correct one. The current filter uses the SF_NOTIFY_LOG flag to respond to
the OnLog event in the ISAPI filter. Then it uses the HTTP_FILTER_LOG
object in that event to insert the appropriate user name value in the log
file.

Thanks,
Sean Carpenter

 

[bruce barker \(sqlwork.com\)]

the iis log can only be updated by a isapi filter. te next release of iis
(7.0) will support writing managed filters.

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)

 

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Thanks for your followup.

Yes, remain the ISAPI route will be reasonable so far. Also, if you would
like to read the IIS log file ,the IIS log utility component may helps

http://blogs.msdn.com/robert_mcmurray/archive/2006/03/27/562127.aspx

If you meet any furhter ASP.NET specific issue, please feel free to let me
know.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Karen]

If I write an isapi filter to update the cs-username log field, is it
possible to get the user's username from the .net Membership API?