Thanks, Eric. I can give those a shot. Some info is better than nothing.

Buddy Pennington
Head of Library Systems & Technology (Librarian III)
Miller Nichols Library
University of Missouri--Kansas City


-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Eric Phetteplace
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2018 2:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [BEWARE-SUSPECTED SPAM]Re: [CODE4LIB] Capturing referring URL for proxy problem?

Hi Buddy,

I think you would have to obtain access to the HTTP referrer headings to do this and those are largely useless nowadays since most sites are HTTPS and do not populate them. But if it is possible to customize the needhost.html to check for that, you could at least collect some data. If you can't do anything server side, JavaScript has a "document.referrer" property but I'm not sure how accurate it is:
https://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-DOM-Level-2-HTML-20090303/html.html#ID-95229140

Browser support is bad (Chrome & Firefox only <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/referrer#Browser_compatibility>).
In my testing, document.referrer only returns the google domain, not a full URI, for search referrals and was sometimes entirely empty (e.g. after going through our CAS login screen on the way through EZproxy). Good luck!

Best,
Eric


On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 12:29 PM Pennington, Buddy D. <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> We are an EZproxy shop. If someone clicks a proxied link and gets 
> directed to the needhost.html error page because the proxied link is 
> not included in the configuration file we collect that link and allow 
> the user to submit the problem to us to fix. What we would also like 
> to collect is the page the user is on when they click the problem 
> link. For example, if they click a bad EBSCO link on a Canvas page, we 
> want to collect both the EBSCO link and the Canvas page URL. Is there a fairly easy way to do this?
>
>
>
> Buddy Pennington
> Head of Library Systems & Technology (Librarian III) Miller Nichols 
> Library University of Missouri--Kansas City
>