Using Filters for the Web Access Management Statistics Report

The Web Access Management Statistics Report Filters allow your organization to categorize and filter different types of HTTP requests in order to configure your statistics to provide you with the results your organization requires.

Whenever a patron attempts to access a proxied resource, your system generates a request to that resource and compares the request against your Web Access Management Statistics wam_filter file. Web Access Management includes a default version of this file, but you can customize the file to better meet your needs.

The wam_filter file is a text file that resides in the live/configuration directory on your server. You can edit this file directly with the Web Master function, or you can use a third party FTP program to download it to your local PC and edit it with a text editor of your choice. After you have made your changes, replace the file using the same FTP method.

The elements included in the wam_filter file appear in the following pipe-delimited format and are described below:

Index Number|Category Name|WAM token(s)|Apply to|Regular Expression

• Index Number — A unique number that identifies the filter category. You can repeat the index number if you want to combine several filters into a single category. The filters do not have to appear in numerical order.
• Category Name — A custom name to categorize the request. Web Access Management compares each patron request against the wam_filter file and categorizes the request using the Category Name of the first successful match.

A single X character is a special Category Name that indicates to the system that you do not want to log any requests matching a particular line in the wam_filter.

• WAM token(s) — A comma-delimited list of tokens used in the forward table. The wam_filter is applied to those databases matching the list of tokens.

Use an asterisk (*) to apply the wam_filter to all resources.

• Apply to — Specifies whether the Regular Expression element should match against either the url or the head:

url matches against the portion of the URL that follows the host:port.

head matches against the http header of the response from the server.

• Regular Expression—The regular expression to match against the request. When using regular expressions, you must escape characters that are part of regular expression syntax such as '.', '/', or '?'. Standard POSIX regular expressions are supported.

The following is an example of an excerpt from a wam_filter file:

#Index Number|Category Name|WAM token(s)|Apply to|Regular Expression
100|images|*|head|image\/.*
#100|X|*|head|image\/.*
101|js script|*|head|application\/x-javascript
102|css|*|head|text\/css
103|redirect (302)|*|head|HTTP.*302
104|forbidden (403)|*|head|HTTP.*403
105|page not found (404)|*|head|HTTP.*404
106|bad gateway (502)|*|head|HTTP.*502
107|JSTOR Page View|JSTOR|url|.*\/view\/.*
108|HTML page|*|head|text\/html
109|pdf download|*|head|application\/.*pdf