Once you have Smi installed and Smi is collecting data from your visitors, you have the possibility to use the data collected by Smi in your website. These are numerous possiblities to use the data, like lists of the most popular pages, the most visited Frequently Asked Questions or a list of users currently online. To retrieve all this data, you need to use the SmiData macro. This macro has several built-in queries you can use but also allows you to write a custom sql statement.

Performance

Because the Smi data is stored by SmiServer and SmiServer may be running in a different location than your webserver is, the SmiData macro sends the sql query to over the WCF connection to SmiServer and receives the result back from SmiServer. If your webserver is not running on the same machine or local network as SmiServer is, it is important that you take performance into account. It may be possible that the time needed for the roundtrip from your webserver to SmiServer and back takes so long that you need to use the Cache macro to cache the result for some time. This may also be necessary when the result of the query is too big to obtain a reasonable transfer time.