Dave Burke : Freelance .NET Web Developer specializing in Online Communities

I am excited to tell you about new Sueetie Activity Logging, capturing activity across a Sueetie community from every application.  Activity logging is online at Sueetie.com and recording the action as we speak.  The Sueetie Activity List shown below, however, is not on sueetie.com yet. Sorry. I’ll get it online for you as soon as we aggregate a bit more activity data.  The screenshot below is from my development site.

I’d like to point out a few highlights if I may. For starters, we are seeing our first appearance of grouping in Sueetie List Controls, here by date. Secondly, you see activity from blogs, forums, the wiki, media gallery and even new marketplace ads, but if you look closer at media-related activity you’ll see that we’re displaying not simply media activity, but media activity by TYPE of media. Videos, photos and document types can be found in the list. Given the fact that all of Gallery Server Pro contains catch-all media albums, being able to define activity by media type is pretty slick.  More on that in a bit.

To be honest, I never paid much attention to community activity-type listings, but being able to demonstrate activity from multiple applications in an integrated logging model is very exciting to me. It is also an essential characteristic of Sueetie, being able to tie together multiple applications to appear as a single community application.  The Community Activity Log certainly does that.

There is also an administrative piece to the Activity Log where the display flag can be set and custom activities can be added. I designed activity logging so that activity types can be added programmatically in custom classes, complete with enumerator intellisense support. More on that in future posts.

What makes the Activity Log and other integrated services possible is the Sueetie Data Unification Model, where all application data finds its way into Sueetie_Content and its supporting tables which define application and content type, with relationships to the source data.

Below you see the Data Unification model in action, where we add application data to Sueetie_Content and log the activity. The SueetieContent object contains the unification properties we’ll need while obtaining the all-important contentID key that uniquely identifies every data item in the community. Then SueetieLogs.LogUserEntry() with the UserLogCategoryType Intellisense-enabled activity indicator takes us home.

About those media gallery types, I’ve always been a monogamous media type of guy, one media type per folder. Activity Logs do accommodate multi-purpose media albums, but we’re also layering album media type logic with a new album SueetieContentType property supplied when the album is created as shown below.

There are other new logging features to tell you about, but I’ll stop here for now. I’m sorry you cannot yet see Activity Logging Live at sueetie.com, but I was excited to tell you about Activity Logging and didn’t want to wait until we had enough activity data to let the Sueetie Home Page Activity List Control shine.  I will definitely let you know when we’re in Activity Log Display Mode at sueetie.com.

And yes, Activity Logging will be available in Gummy Bear 1.2. The icons, however, will not.  All of the backend coding to make activity logging happen was the easy part. Finding the activity icons was hard, so you’re going to have to get your own.