Referer field in easyTravel
I've been looking into the referer field for a prospect who'd like dynaTrace to be more like Google Analytics (or Tealeaf?) and I noticed something in easyTravel I don't understand.
It looks like the referer field is set to the page itself. That is, when a web request for http://localhost:8079/orange.jsf arrives, the referer field is also set to http://localhost:8079/orange.jsf.
I don't think this is right. I understand that the data is synthetic – there aren't actually real people hitting the web site on my laptop – but would it be possible to set this field to a more realistic value?
Or do I misunderstand?
-- Graeme
Correct. So it should be with easyTravel and the simulated traffic. The thing with easyTravel though is that most of the actions are actually executed on orange.jsf. So - when you search it goes back to the same url that you are already on. There is only a small number of different urls ending with .jsf
I wasn't so much concerned with the domain as with the fact that every page is its own referer. That is, all the requests to /orange.jsf have /orange.jsf as the referer.
My understand of the referer field is that it is where the user came from. So if a user clicks on a link on page1.html and goes to page2.html, the referer field for the page2.html request will be "page1.html".
Is this correct?
-- Graeme
The referer field is set in a way the browser would set it - meaning - telling the web server the context of where this request comes from - or better - where the user came from.
We use the referer as one of the options to "link" requests to user actions. So - the referer must match the URLs of the actual application. If you run easyTravel on localhost:8079 then the referer should use that URL. If you setup easyTravel to use alias domains, e.g: www.easytravel.com it will automatically use it.
