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## Events, Event Logging, and Event Properties

The combination of logging and monitoring events in wwlog_api and wwlog_api_admin API packages enables an end-user with appropriate privileges to analyze events that have occurred in their Oracle Portal installation.

This topic presents the following subjects:

- What are events?

- Sample loggable objects and actions

- Characteristics of events and event logging

- Creating log records

- Key columns

- Event properties

### What are events?

Events are Oracle Portal processes, or actions that can be performed on database objects. Descriptive information about an event can be captured, and both this and discretionary information can be stored in Oracle Portal logging tables.

If the elapsed time of an event is automatically determined by an event handling API, it is automatically logged. Events can be logged with starting and stopping calls, they can also be logged with a single call. In this case, the caller of the API must calculate the elapsed time.

### Sample loggable objects and actions

Object | Action
Pages | Create, Edit, View, Delete
Category | View
Perspective | View
Items | Create, Edit, Move, View, Delete, Checkout, Checkin
Documents | Create, View, Delete
Components | Create, Edit, Execute, Delete
Users | Create, Edit, Delete, Login, Logout, Add to group, Delete from group
Groups | Create user, Create group, Delete user, Add to group, Delete from group, Delete group
Search | Search
Portlet | Added to page, Deleted from page, Hide, Show, Customize

### Characteristics of events and event logging

Before working with event logging methods, you should be familiar with this information:

- Events are tagged with the name of the Oracle Portal domain in which they occurred.
- One method can start an event and another can end it.
- The interval between log entry purges (see purge_log procedure) can be defined in days (see set_log_interval procedure) by users with appropriate security privileges.
- Every log entry has an ID, which is a unique identifier.
- The logging information is accessible through provider-written SQL calls.
- String values that relate to other information in the record or to information stored elsewhere can be stored in designated fields in the event logs.

### Creating log records

Providers determine which events are logged into the Oracle Portal logging tables. A logging call for an event follows this sequence:

1. The logging table is checked for a match between the parameters specified in the event logging call and existing registry records.

2. If the call parameters match the parameters of an existing record, the event called to be logged is an event that should be logged, and the log record is added to the table.

3. If a match is not found, nothing is recorded.

For example, if the only record in the wwlog_registry$ table contains the event property names and values shown below, then only logging requests for the Research&Development domain, Expenses sub-domain, and the VIEW action for any folder in the domain, by any user, and with any browser in any language, are recorded in the logging tables.

Event property | Value
domain | Research&Development
sub_domain | Expenses
name | %
userid | %
action | VIEW
http_user_agent | %
language | %

Notes:

- The % symbol is used for wild card matching with any value that appears in a specified column in the wwlog_registry$ logging table.
- If the only record in the table has a % in every column, then all log requests create records in the logging tables.
- If there are no records in the table, then no log records are recorded.

### Key columns

The key columns in the wwlog_registry table are provided for recording identifying values that help to relate the logging record to other data.

For example, when logging events about a folder in a content area, key_1 could hold the Content Area ID and key_2 could hold the folder ID.

Notes:

- Use of any key column is optional.
- The values in the key columns vary according to the requirements of the sub-systems that are recording log records.

In Oracle Portal, the logging methods can be called from PL/SQL packages only. The PL/SQL implementation of the logging API is installed in the wwlog_api and wwlog_api_admin packages.

### Event properties

Events properties are loggable aspects of an event. Some of these properties must be supplied by the caller of the API, and others are automatically gathered by the API itself. Event properties exactly correspond to the record fields in the logging tables (see Event Log Record).

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