Question

Count number of times a file is opened / viewed / accessed ?

Audit Trail

Updated November 19, 2013

asked on November 18, 2013

Question from a current LF client, they want to know if LF specifically tracks and can report on # of times a file is opened, viewed and/or otherwise accessed.

I can imagine that audit trail accumulates this information, but is there an existing method of reporting these ?

They are currently on 8.2.1

Thanks

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Answer

APPROVED ANSWER

replied on November 18, 2013

Right, the audit logs are the only place where you could get this data. The server does not maintain any kind of access count.

What is the use case here? What would you do with this information?

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replied on November 19, 2013

You may want to write a small script and add an icon to your LF Client that allows you to select a file or a group of files and select them and click the button to open up audit trail and find out this information.

Any other way I can think of would likely not be recommended and overly complicated. I think my suggestion would accomplish the goal in a way that only those that need this information can access it, but it is not as instant as having this information as a piece of metadata would be.

The other idea I came up with was if you had a workflow that would automatically version a file if it was opened but unedited. This would make the version count reflect the count of accesses and changes. Not sure how much overhead this would add to the workflow server as a whole or to the LF DB Server

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replied on November 19, 2013

Kenneth,

The LFServer does not send out notifications when the documents are opened, so there is no way for Workflow to version documents as they are opened. And even if it could, the overhead on the system would be huge for virtually no benefit. The user experience would also suffer since you would end up with possibly hundreds or thousands of versions with no useful information.

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replied on November 19, 2013

The overhead would be extreme to create such a solution but it was more of an afterthought of how extreme it would be to accomplish the task. Instead my first suggestion is more reasonable as well as manageable without much overhead at all

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Count number of times a file is opened / viewed / accessed ?

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