In a project I'm working on, the client has required that every time a user clicks on a link to download (they will be downloading a video or mp3), there should be a log kept of who has downloaded what and when.
I have a table in my database set up to record the User ID, the File ID, and the date when it was downloaded. However, I don't know how to do this, as the link is basically an tag (obviously).
What is the best way to achieve this?
Probably the simplest solution would be to write simple onclick ajax event.
If you want noscript solution you'll have to create some download wrapper, that'd serve you proper file. Just create special route and controller (eg. /downloads/filename), increment download meter for this one and return asset instead of html response. Don't forget to set proper Content-Type header tho.
There's also IgorwFileServeBundle that could help you loads.
Instead of linking to the MP3 file, you'll have to funnel the download through a PHP script that writes to the database and then sends the MP3 data with with the right headers. For maximum performance use the "X-Sendfile" header instead of the PHP readfile function.
Alternatively you could set up a cron job for a Symfony console command line tool that parses the Apache access log and writes to the DB whenever it encounters an MP3 file.