Tech note FS1423
Description
How can I restrict analysis to a top-level directory (folder) such as /customer1/ or /customer2/?
Answer
This feature is useful for when your web server hosts several web sites. Instead of analyzing the whole directory structure, starting with /, you may want to restrict a certain FlashStats user to only analyzing a certain subdirectory. FlashStats can easily do this.
Note: If you are hosting different web sites on IIS 3, each with their own IP addresses, then you should refer to tech note FS1439 instead.
To analyze only hits starting with a given subdirectory, you need to create a separate FlashStats user account for each subdirectory, and then restrict each user account to the appropriate subdirectory.
For sake of example, let's assume that you're an ISP named http://www.domain.com, and you are have two customers: http://www.abc.com and http://www.xyz.com. (Or they could be http://www.domain.com/abc/ and http://www.domain.com/xyz/ -- the result is the same.)
If you look at the bottom of the FlashStats configuration file (FlashStats.ini or FlashStats.conf), you'll probably find an existing user account definition that looks something like this:
user=sample;url=http://www.domain.com;logs=somewhere
This is a simplification; the line would likely be more detailed.
What you need to do is to create two new user account, like this:
user=abc;url=http://www.abc.com;logs=somewhere;find=/abc/
user=xyz;url=http://www.xyz.com;logs=somewhere;find=/xyz/
When editing these lines, be sure to keep an entire user account definition on one long line; don't wrap the definition onto several lines.
The most important feature of these lines is the find= parameter. This parameter tells FlashStats that any reports run by this user should only be able to see results for requests starting with the specified text. Each user can still run reports for any items within their own subdirectory, but they will not see hits for documents under any other top-level subdirectory.
There is another wording of this same topic in Chapter 5. The find= parameter is also explained in Chapter 4 of the documentation.
