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In Liferay 7 Enterprise Edition,
I want to log user info like user_name in external log files automatically in each request to track user activities, how to do that?
without using auditing plugin
when I tried to log post request for example (login), it doesn’t contain any info about user ?!
3
Answers
Look at this code:
https://github.com/amusarra/liferay-portal-security-audit
in particular the portal-security-audit-capture-events module that catch the login events.
This seems a job for a filter, the user information is normally extracted from the themeDysplay, like in:
If you want to track specific portlets, an OSGi portlet filter would do the job.
This kind of thing is much harder than you might think…
Getting access to the current user is really easy. As Victor pointed out, you can use the ThemeDisplay object to get current user. If you don’t have the request around, you can use the PrincipalThreadLocal to find the current user id.
That gives you the who, but certainly not the “what is user doing” aspects. Since the portal aggregates the HTML fragments of many portlets, from a servlet filter perspective it would be hard to gleam which one of the available portlets on an incoming URL is actually being interacted with. You could try a portlet filter to narrow the field, but this will just tell you what portlet is being accessed but not what they are doing with it.
Although you rejected the built in audit functionality available in DXP, it really is the answer for tracking who did what in the portal because it has the necessary touch points to get those two pieces and put them together.
Now if you rejected the built in audit functionality because you want a file and not a database entry, that is easy to solve. Go to the System Settings control panel and find the Logging Audit Message Processor and enable it. It will write the audit events out to a file in CSV format, but you should have the source for modules/apps/foundation/portal-security-audit/portal-security-audit-router/src/main/java/com/liferay/portal/security/audit/router/internal/LoggingAuditMessageProcessor.java so you can use this as a basis to write your own format.