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PHP: Recording Page Hits

Wanted to create something that was easy to use, maintain and grow. It's extremely basic as it is. It stores the page visited and if the user is logged in, their id; if the user is not logged in, it currently stores "0" as the user id.

Later, this class might expand to store the user's browsing history by recording their IP address and the pages that they visit.

You'll first need to create 2 tables within your database: pages and statistics. You'll need 3 but I'll show you how to create two. The third one is users that you should probably already have if your users are logging in at all. Note: I'll show you how to create the ReportError class in my next post.

The pages stores the URI for each page. You don't want to store the page within the statistics table, just the id. This is for optimization and to minimize repetitiveness.


The next table is the statistics table. This table contains the id's referencing other tables and the times the page was accessed by the individual user. All non-logged-in users are grouped together. The users_id references your users table (you'll need to have a constant id for the user logged in). If the user is not logged in, he or she is assigned the value of 0. The page_id stores the id for that particular page located in the pages table. The times_accessed column stores the amount of times that particular combination occurred (i.e. the unique id and page id combination: you'll need to have both the users_id and page_id set to PRIMARY to use the ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE feature listed in the code below).


When the user logs in, you'll need to save their id into the session variable.

When the main() method within the StoreHistory class gets called, the following steps take place:
  • Instantiate the Database Connection and Error Reporting classes
  • Establish connection to the database
  • Initialize the $_page_id property
  • If the page was never accessed before, store the page URI and the today's date.
  • If the page was previously accessed update the last_accessed column with today's date.
  • You'll notice in the code that I also set id = LAST_INSERT_ID(id). You'll need to use this when the ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE is called and you want to still retrieve the last insert_id.
  • Check whether $_SESSION['users_id'] is active and not empty. If not, store the users_id otherwise store "0" as the value.
  • If this is the first time that this unique combination is being stored within the statistics table, insert the value of "1" into the times_accessed column; otherwise, update the times_accessed table by adding 1 to it.

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