We need to track every time a file is downloaded from our server so that we may report on usage. We are currently migrating to a new Java/JSP (Documentum and WDK) based Web application. We wrote a perl script before under the old system to parse the log files and construct a report but I'm fairly certain there is a better way now that we are using Tomcat and Java. I thought about using a filter to increment a counter every time a request matched a particular pattern and I also thought about using the log file approach again this time using a java logging package but I'm not really sure what the best approach would be. Especially since we will not only need to record the download but query the database (or in this case documentum) in order to check for a specific attribute relevant to the report.
Any ideas on how best to accomplish this are appreciated. -Mark
