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Extending the Visit Framework

Using the Visit Framework

Overview

The Visit framework:

  1. Manages a cookie that uniquely identifies a visitor to your website.
  2. Provides a plug-in mechanism so that your code can be called when a visitor browses your site.
  3. The visit framework is also the foundation of the identity framework used by TurboGears for authentication and authorization purposes.

Configuration

Visit configuration is done in app.cfg. The purpose of the configuration options should be pretty clear from the comments in app.cfg, but here are some of the more interesting options.

visit.on
Turns the visit framework on if True
visit.sourcecookie
Where to look for the key of an existing visit in the request and in which order. Comma-separated list of possible values: 'cookie', 'form'. By default only use the visit key found in a session cookie. New in 1.0.6.
visit.timeout

The number of minutes a visitor may be idle before the visit is considered to be ‘expired’.

The default is 20 minutes. If you extend this to be a really long time period, you are defeating the point of tracking a visit. Remember, you are trying to track visits to the site, not track a ‘user’ over any number of visits.

visit.cookie.name
You can change the name of the cookie that is sent to the visitor. The default is 'tg-visit'.
visit.form.nametg_visit
The name of the request parameter from which the visit key may be retrieved when visit.source includes 'form'. The name MUST NOT contain dashes or dots or it will break the request parameters decoding by the NestedVariablesFilter. New in 1.0.6.
visit.cookie.permanent
If you want to be able to recover a session even when the browser was closed (within the timeout specified above), you can set this to True. But be aware that this will make your application less secure.

Tracking Visits With Request Parameters

New in 1.0.6.

Sometimes tracking visits with a session cookie is not possible, either because the user has disabled cookies in his browser or a buggy web client does not transfer the session cookie with the visit key correctly. As a workaround the visit key can also be retrieved from the request parameters (whether URL or request body parameters). This is not enabled by default for security reasons because session-hijacking vulnerabilities can easily be introduced by improper use of session IDs in URLs. To enable retrieval of the visit key from the request params, set visit.source to include the value "form" in your application’s configuration. Example:

visit.source = 'cookie, form'

With this setting, the visit framework will look for the visit key first in the session cookie and, if it is not found, in a request parameter with the name set by the visit.form.name configuration setting (default "tg_visit"). If the visit key is found in the request parameters, the request parameter will be stripped from the parameters so your controller methods do not need to handle an extra parameter.

You must make arrangements for the client to transfer the visit key with the request parameters by either adding it to the query string of any URLs pointing to your application (for GET requests) or by adding the parameter to POST requests, for example by adding a hidden form field with the visit key to forms. You can get the value of the current visit key in your templates with tg.identity.visit_key.

Example for including the visit key in a URL for a GET request:

<a href="${tg.url('/foo', {tg.config('visit.form.name', 'tg_visit'): tg.identity.visit_key})}"
  >Click here</>

Example for including the visit key in a POST request through a form:

<form action="${tg.url('/foo')}" method="POST">
  <input type="hidden"
    name="${tg.config('visit.form.name', 'tg_visit')}"
    value="${tg.identity.visit_key}" />
  ...
</form>

Housekeeping

Currently the Visit framework does not clean out old visit entries from the database, so expired visits will accumulate there and should be cleaned up once in a while. How often this is necessary depends on the traffic your website gets and whether you want to be able to check who was logged in at which time later.

It is advisable to set up a periodic job to clean up old visit entries every day (week, hour, whatever suits you). Here is an example of a function that accomplishes this if you are using an SQLAlchemy visit/identity model:

# tasks.py

import logger
import datetime

from yourpkg.model import Visit, VisitIdentity, session

log = logging.getLogger('yourpkg.tasks')

def expunge_expired_visits(keep_days=7):
    """Expunge all visits and corresponding visitidentity entries from the
    database, which are older than 'keep_days' (default: 7 days)."""

    t2 = datetime.timedelta(days=keep_days)
    visits = Visit.query.filter(
        Visit.expiry < (datetime.datetime.now() - t2))
    log.info('Expunging all visits older than %i days.', keep_days)
    log.debug('Expunging %i old visit(s).', visits.count())
    for visit in visits:
        vi = VisitIdentity.by_visit_key(visit.visit_key)
        if vi:
            session.delete(vi)
        session.delete(visit)
    session.flush()

This cleans out all expired visit entries, which have expired more than keep_days days ago. It also deletes the VisitIdentity objects corresponding to these expired visits. You can use the TurboGears scheduler to run this function periodically or use a console script entry point to provide a script, which can be run from cron. If you do so, make sure that the configuration file is loaded, so that SQLAlchemy knows about your connection dburi. See Using your model outside of TurboGears for more information on this topic.

Extending the Visit Framework

The visit framework can be extended with visit plugins or by replacing the standard visit manager with a custom one. Please see the page Extending the Visit Framework for more information.