Readme for analog -- time reports

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# Analog 6.0: Time reports

This section is about commands which control the appearance of the time reports. There are thirteen such reports, which show the pattern of usage over time. Eight of them (the ones with "Report" in their name) show the usage at specific times, whilst the other five (the "Summaries") show the total (not average) activity at particular times of day and week over the whole time period of the report.

By the way, in the following lists, don't get confused between the commands for the Quarterly Report (which begin with `QUARTERLY`) and those for the Quarter-Hour Report and Quarter-Hour Summary (with begin with `QUARTERREP` and `QUARTERSUM` respectively).

Each time report can contain columns listing the requests, requests for pages, and bytes transferred at that time, using the following code letters.

`R`
  Number of requests
`r`
  Percentage of the requests
`P`
  Number of page requests
`p`
  Percentage of the page requests
`B`
  Number of bytes transferred
`b`
  Percentage of the bytes

Which columns appear in which reports is controlled by various `COLS` commands. For example, the command

    HOURSUMCOLS Pb

tells analog to include the number of page requests and percentage of the bytes, in that order, as the columns for the Hourly Summary. The full list of these `COLS` commands is `YEARCOLS`, `QUARTERLYCOLS`, `MONTHCOLS`, `WEEKCOLS`, `DAYREPCOLS`, `DAYSUMCOLS`, `HOURREPCOLS`, `HOURSUMCOLS`, `WEEKHOURCOLS`, `QUARTERREPCOLS`, `QUARTERSUMCOLS`, `FIVEREPCOLS` and `FIVESUMCOLS`. There is also a `TIMECOLS` command, which specifies that all the time reports are to have the specified columns.

Similarly, analog can plot the bar charts in the time reports according to the number of requests, number of page requests, or number of bytes. This is controlled by the `GRAPH` family of commands. So, for example,

    DAYREPGRAPH P

tells analog to plot the bar charts in the Daily Report by the number of page requests. This also controls how analog decides which is the busiest time period in the bottom line of the report. Using a lower case letter tells analog to plot the bar charts with ASCII characters instead of the normal red bars. (This produces shorter output, and it is how they appear anyway in `PLAIN` and `ASCII` output styles, or when viewed with a non-graphical browser.) So, for example,

    DAYREPGRAPH b

would plot the Daily Report by bytes, without using the graphics. The full list of `GRAPH` commands is `YEARGRAPH`, `QUARTERLYGRAPH`, `MONTHGRAPH`, `WEEKGRAPH`, `DAYREPGRAPH`, `DAYSUMGRAPH`, `HOURREPGRAPH`, `HOURSUMGRAPH`, `WEEKHOURGRAPH`, `QUARTERREPGRAPH`, `QUARTERSUMGRAPH`, `FIVEREPGRAPH` and `FIVESUMGRAPH`. There's also an `ALLGRAPH` command to set all of them simultaneously.

There are various possible graphics available for the graphs, controlled by the `BARSTYLE` command, as follows. (They will all look the same if you have a non-graphical browser.)

    BARSTYLE a
    BARSTYLE b
    BARSTYLE c
    BARSTYLE d
    BARSTYLE e
    BARSTYLE f
    BARSTYLE g
    BARSTYLE h
    BARSTYLE i
    BARSTYLE j

The default style is `b`.

You can plot the graphs either forwards in time (starting from the earliest date) or backwards (starting from the latest date). Use commands like

    MONTHBACK ON  # Monthly Report backwards
    WEEKBACK OFF  # Weekly Report forwards

The full list of `BACK` commands is `YEARBACK`, `QUARTERLYBACK`, `MONTHBACK`, `WEEKBACK`, `DAYREPBACK`, `HOURREPBACK`, `QUARTERREPBACK` and `FIVEREPBACK`. It tends to be confusing to mix directions (and analog will warn you if you attempt it) so usually you want to use the `ALLBACK` command which will set all of them at once.

For the more detailed time reports, you usually only want to list the last few time periods. (Every five minutes for the last three years?? I think not.) So analog provides some `ROWS` commands to let you specify how many rows you want in the time reports. For example

    QUARTERREPROWS 96  # only the last day's worth
    MONTHROWS 0        # 0 means no restriction: show all time

The full list of `ROWS` commands is `YEARROWS`, `QUARTERLYROWS`, `MONTHROWS`, `WEEKROWS`, `DAYREPROWS`, `HOURREPROWS`, `QUARTERREPROWS` and `FIVEREPROWS`. Even if a `ROWS` command is given, the line at the bottom of the report will still show the busiest time period ever, not just the busiest one in that many rows.

The character which is used for plotting the graphs in `PLAIN` and `ASCII` styles or on a non-graphical browser is specified by means of the `MARKCHAR` command. For example,

    MARKCHAR =

tells analog to use the equals sign.

There is a parameter called `MINGRAPHWIDTH` which sets the minimum nominal size of the graphs. For example, if you set

    MINGRAPHWIDTH 10

then the graph will be allowed to be up to 10 characters wide, even if that would exceed the `PAGEWIDTH`.

There is one more command which affects the time reports. You can specify which day should be counted as the first day of the week. This affects the layout of the Daily Report, Daily Summary, Weekly Report and Hour of the Week Summary. For example, our local student newspaper publishes a new edition on the web every Friday, so they like to specify `WEEKBEGINSON FRIDAY` for their reports.

In the next section, we'll look at commands relating to the non-time reports.

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