Logging Interface Access

ChatGPT has no clue how Appian works.

Did you check whether the records usage log meets your requirements?

ChatGPT's approach isn't "wrong", it's just incomplete and can be misleading. Even 2025's latest LLMs are like the over-confident interns we're constantly correcting and rolling our eyes at. Yet in this case, its approach is possible.

For this to work

• You need a what's colloquially known as a "loopback" API call, where an Appian API is called via an Appian integration that uses an API key from the admin console. In theory it's possible to have the logged in user authenticate to the Appian API as themselves, but in practice it's a little more nuanced than that. Depending on your environment's security requirements, loopback API's may not be a good idea to do in production.
• API trace logging must be enabled in the admin console. Enabling this logging can cause a bit of overhead in production, and the logs will be overwritten every few days (or ~10MB) if there is a large volume of API calls.
• View perflogs/web_api_trace.csv

According to your prompt, you don't need to know who loaded the page, just that the page was loaded. If you need to know who loaded the page, there's a bit more development / complexity there.

If you absolutely must have this, it's pretty easy to create an Appian Web API that accepts key info (i.e. the username of the current user, and the name or some sort of identifier for the interface in question), which you can then call from the interface at load time in a local variable declaraion calling an Integration.  The API would simply launch a process model that quickly makes an entry for that username and that identifier in a DB table you have previously created, as well as a "loaded at" timestamp. 

I've implemented something like this for myself and decided to limit the DB table to 1 row per user per day per interface, so when it launches for a particular user, if there's already a row for that date/user/interface, it updates the existing row (incrementing an "updated" timestamp, as well as a "counter" that starts at 1 and increments for every unique load by that user).  This is slightly extra work of course but has been pretty useful to me and our management team in tracking overall site usage.

Thank you all for your advice.

Although I initially lacked some information, ultimately, I would like to calculate usage rates for each application from the log data. Therefore, I prefer to save the logs as records rather than text files. Additionally, since I need to calculate usage rates by organization, user information is also necessary.

Hence, I believe the approach Mike has already implemented is the closest to what I need.

I implemented the Web API as shown below. While it returns an image file as the response, it seems that neither a!startProcess, a!writeToDataStoreEntity, nor a!writeRecords functions are executing.

I implemented it using the GET method to return the image file. Is there anything else I should do?

a!localVariables(

  local!codea: 200,
  local!codeb: 200,
  local!codec: 200,

  local!a: a!writeToDataStoreEntity(
    dataStoreEntity: cons!XLOG_EVENT,
    valueToStore: 'type!{urn:com:appian:types:XLOG}XLOG_RT_EVENT'(
      timestamp: now(),
      appName: "Application Name",
      functionName: "Function Name",
      user: tostring(loggedInUser())
    ),
    onSuccess: a!save(local!codea, 201),
    onError: a!save(local!codea, 202)
  ),

  local!b: a!writeRecords(
    records: 'recordType!{}XLOG rtEvent'(
      'recordType!{}XLOG rtEvent.fields.{}timestamp': now(),
      'recordType!{}XLOG rtEvent.fields.{}appName': "Application Name RT",
      'recordType!{}XLOG rtEvent.fields.{}functionName': "Function Name RT",
      'recordType!{}XLOG rtEvent.fields.{}user': tostring(loggedInUser())
    ),
    onSuccess: a!save(local!codeb, 201),
    onError: a!save(local!codeb, 202)
  ),

  local!c: a!startProcess(
    processModel: cons!XLOG_pmTest,
    onSuccess: a!save(local!codec, 201),
    onError: a!save(local!codec, 202)
  ),

  local!d: a!richTextDisplayField(
    value: "code: " & local!codea & " " & local!codeb& " " & local!codec
  ),

  a!httpResponse(
    statusCode: local!codec,
    headers: {
      a!httpHeader(name: "Content-Type", value: "image/png"),
      a!httpHeader(name: "Cache-Control", value: "no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0"),
      a!httpHeader(name: "Pragma", value: "no-cache")
    },
    body: cons!XLOG_PNG
  )
)

NOTE:In this sample code, these local variables are only for debbuging.

Keizo,

Create the Web API as a POST but make sure that you check the Queries Data and not Modifies data.

- The webAPI must create an entry onto the database table where you are logging the event.

Create an integration to call that webAPI

In your interface, call the integration

a!localVariables(

local!eventLog: rule!MY_Integration(),

a!sectionLayout(

label: "My Label",

contents: {}

)

)

This should work. Let me know if you got any questions

Lejanson