track-event

Track events to multiple destinations

Motivation

Why not use segment's IO analytics.js instead?

Analytics.js is cute but they force you to use the same dumbed down API for all analytics services.

track-event focuses on:

• Creating a single client for all services
• Calling service specific functions on the client so you send your data to the analytics service in the exact format you want
• Exposing the raw clients for custom functionality
• Being browserify compliant

As a bonus it can also do RPC calls to another track-event client through an iframe to basically allow you to track users with a single cookie on a single tracking domain in your cross domain applications.

For example if you wanted to track your users in a chrome extension or in a hangout app.

Example (mixpanel)

var Client = require("track-event/client")
var track = require("track-event/track")

var client = Client({
    mixpanel: {
        token: "mixpanel_key"
    }
})

track(client, "event name", {
    "some properties": "go here"
}, function (err, res) {
    /* ... */
})

var mixpanel = client.mixpanel
// do custom stuff with mixpanel client directly.

Example (GA)

var Client = require("track-event/client")
var trackEvent = require("track-event/trackEvent")

var client = Client({
    ga: "UA-XXX"
})

trackEvent(client, "some category", "some label")

var tracker = client.tracker
tracker._trackPageview()
// do custom stuff with GA tracker

Example (AJAX Back end)

var Client = require("track-event/client")
var xhr = require("track-event/xhr")

var client = Client({
    xhr: "http://example.com/track"
})

xhr(client, { "send arbitary": "json data"}, function (err, res) {
    /* ... */
})

Example (postMessage)

You want to use postMessage if you want to use say mixpanel's API from your own domain on a seperate site. So you embed an iframe to your own site on the third party domain and use postMessage to send track events

postMessage code

Use postMessage(client, method, args) to effectively make an RPC call on the client created within the iframe.

// on http://third-party.com
var Client = require("track-event/client")
var postMessage = require("track-event/postMessage")

var iframe = document.createElement("iframe")
iframe.src = "http://example.com/tracking-iframe"
document.body.appendChild(iframe)

var client = Client({
    postMessage: {
        iframe: iframe
        , origin: "http://example.com"
    }
})

// use `"track"`, `"trackEvent"`, etc to send arbitary data.
// You can't send callbacks currently
postMessage(client, "track", ["track some mixpanel event", {
    "with some arbitary": "properties etc."
}])

iframe page code

Just instantiate a client and tell it to handle onMessage and whitelist the third party domain you want to accept incoming RPC calls from.

// on http://example/com/tracking-iframe
var Client = require("track-event/client")

var client = Client({
    mixpanel: {
        token: "some mixpanel token"
    }
    , onMessage: {
        origin: ["http://third-party.com"]
    }
})

Installation

npm install track-event

Contributors

• Raynos

MIT Licenced