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Tracking Users' Activities with Custom Logs in LightSwitch

  • Mar 13, 2012
Alessandro Del Sole, author of Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Unleashed, explains how to use LightSwitch to implement a very common requirement in business applications: generating logs when users perform an activity, so that administrators or supervisors can keep track of what happens during the application's lifetime.
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Introduction

Almost every application that works with data needs to implement a mechanism that keeps track of users' activities and of the kind of data with which they're working. Reasons may include the following:

  • Sensitive information. If users are required to work with sensitive data, supervisors must know what data and why the user has worked with it.
  • Activity history. A company executive might want to see how productive an employee is, based on specific activities.
  • Administration. An administrator might need to analyze the application usage based on activities that users perform most, or might need to discover whether a particular problem occurred at a certain moment in the application's lifetime.

These are the most common reasons to implement a log mechanism, but you might have additional needs, according to your company's policies.

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