User and group identification
You can identify a user with a user session only when the user fills out a form or selects a particular website. The system extracts the following types of personal information that can be associated with a session:
- User ID — The user's name. For example, if someone logs on as john@example.com, his or her user name might be john. The user name can also come from other places, such as a URI stem or a cookie.
- Group ID — The user's group. If someone logs on as john@example.com, the group might be example.com. You might also want to use a part of the host name to identify the web group (for example, mysite.example.com) or even a part of the URI stem (for example, mysite.example.com/example/page.html).
You can also use these fields in a different way — the "user" might be the account number of a customer, and "group" might be a policy number.
In the Session Browser, you can search for a user or group and compare the performance of these searches.
Here are some examples of common user and group extractions:
Location | String | Extraction pattern | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
POST or URI query | username=johndoe@example.com | =([User and group identification^@]+) | johndoe |
URI stem | www.example.com/johndoe/index.jsp | /([^/]+) | johndoe |
Host name | example.mysite.com | ^([User and group identification^\.]+) | example |
POST or URI query | username=johndoe@example.com | @([User and group identification^\.]+)) | example |
POST or URI query | username=johndoe@example.com | @(.*) | example.com |