Introducing the Umbraco View Counter

Over the last couple of days we've been busy creating an Umbraco package that deals with Content View Counters - it enables the web master to track the number of times content has been viewed on the site.

The Documentation and package has just been uploaded to the Umbraco Project Repository and can be downloaded from here.  This post deals with a few of the features of the package, which was built agains Umbraco 4.7 and dotNet 4.0

Introduction

TheRefactored Content Viewspackage is essentially a content views (number of times  viewed) counter.  The current functionality offered by this package includes:

• Optional Data Type that allows for configuring view counters with various categories and the ability to instruct Macros etc. to "hide" the view Count yet still increment it.
• Optional incrementing when displaying the view count (useful when you want to display the view count in a content listing, for example)
• Example Razor Script and Macro.
• Library methods to manipulate the counters and retrieve details as an XML fragment for use with XSLT.

Basic Usage.

To simply retrieve and/or increment the counter for a specific content item, call the following library method.  The category and increment parameters are optional, with default values shown initalics:

ViewCount.GetViewCount(nodeId, category: "<empty string>", increment: false);

There is no requirement to configure a DataType; supplying the node id of any valid Content-based node (Member, Document, Media, etc.) will create the Views record in the database if it doesn't exist.  However configuring and using a DataType will allow you to control the advanced features of the counter.

Out of the box

Out of the box you get a default DataType (View Count) and a sample Razor Macro that displays the current View Count of the node being displayed.  If you have set up the Document Type with the View Count DataType, the macro will check whether the View Count should be displayed or not.

Macro Parameters for Page Views:

• Category (text) - optionally specifies the Category to record the Page Count against.
• Increment (bool) - set to true to increment the Page Count when the macro is called.

Macro Script Contents:

@inherits umbraco.MacroEngines.DynamicNodeContext
@using umbraco.MacroEngines;
@using umbraco.NodeFactory;
@using Refactored.UmbracoViewCounter;

@if (!ViewCount.HideCounter(Model.Id, category: Parameter.Category)) {
  <span># Views:@ViewCount.GetViewCount(@Model.Id, category: @Parameter.Category, increment: @Parameter.Increment == "1").ToString("N0")</span>
} else {
  ViewCount.Increment(Model.Id, category: Parameter.Category);
}

 Setting up a Data Type

The Data Type has the following Parameters:

• Category- Specifyinga different category for multiple DataTypes allows you to differentiate between multiple View Counts in a single content item.  You can then render the content in different views and have a different View Count for each rendering.
• Hide View Count- Allows you to control (in conjunction with the API and Razor or XSLT macros, for example) whether to hide or show the view count at a Data Type level.
• Enable View History- Turns on recording of View Count History data including the time the view was incremented.  Also recorded is Reset command events.  This data is stored in the refViewCountHistory table and persists even if the current view count is reset.  This is off by default.
• Disable Counter Reset- Turning this on disables the Reset action on Content configured with a View Count DataType.