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I am looking to replace our Urchin installation with SmarterStats but i want to know is there any kind of API available for retrieving data from the SmarterStats database?

The reason i ask is that i would like to be able to pull bandwidth usage data for individual sites for display on our customer portal.

Here is a link to the SmarterTools Help that describes the various APSI calls for SmarterStats.

http://help.smartertools.com/SmarterStats/v3/Topics/SystemAdmin/Misc/WebServices.aspx?p=&lic=

I have asked this question before and have been advised that the API is for admin purposes only.
Inserting data, not retrieval.

It is dissapointing that we cannot extract data even if it meant only being able to setupup Smarterstats to use our SQL DB so that we could extract textual values for now.

I see this as a core and basic need for many developers/hosts that use this product and if not provided in future revisions will see clients move onto others that do ;-(

paulsid:

I see this as a core and basic need for many developers/hosts that use this product and if not provided in future revisions will see clients move onto others that do ;-(

Actually, SmarterStats has had the ability to be queried for bandwidth since version 2.x (see the Statistics.asmx functions.  We added the ability for site data to be queried through web services since version 3.3 in the Query.asmx web service.  These are undocumented, unsupported web service calls, and not guaranteed to stay the same with updated versions, but they do work.

To enable the use of this web service, and to prevent people from hammering your server, this web service is password protected.  You'll need to load AppConfig.xml in notepad, find the WebServiceAuthorizationCode setting, and put in a password at least 10 characters long.  This password will need to be passed to every call to query.asmx. 

The query language to use is very similar to sql, but not exactly the same.  An example query is:

  select * from fTopDownloads(1, '2006-01-01', '2007-08-08') order by hits desc

If you want to get sample query names, to use (instead of fTopDownloads), look in Config/ReportConfig.xml for the QueryName and Default sorts to use.

Because this is an undocumented web service call, they are also unsupported.  That said, it should be able to fill almost any need.

Hello Grady -

Thank you very much for this extremely useful piece of information.  Based on your information, I have been able to successfully retrieve some of the data that I require in an automated fashion.  I am having one piece of difficulty however that I am hoping you can shed some light on for me.

I am trying to retrieve data from fTopPages, specifically the data for a specific page for a given date range.  Following your convention, I have written the following query:

select * from fTopPages(1, '2007-11-01', '2007-12-31') where URIStemText='/subdir/thepagename.aspx'

The approach of adding the where clause works sometimes and doesn't work others.  In other words, it locates the page requested and returns the data and sometimes it can not locate the page requested and returns an empty resultset.  The behavior all depends on the page requested, some pages work and some pages do not work. However, when I do not supply the where clause at all, I can locate based on URLStemText the page that I requeste that did not return a resultset.  Additionally, when I use data mining on this same file (using copy paste for the uristem), there is data found.

Am I doing something incorrectly or is there a better way to filter the fTopPages by URIStem?

Regards,

jd98 

Thanks again Grady for the information you provided.

I have FINALLY got around to using this to provide a sample of out stats on our public website.

You can see how we have implemented this here: 

 Horsham Statistics