Add support for namespacing

[alexanderdean]

Original author: Simon Rumble (@shermozle)
Original issue: snowplow/snowplow#145

Extend so that you can record to both a CloudFront and non-CF collector.

Use case is that I want to play with the ETL, but the format that SnowCannon outputs doesn't work with any of the existing ETL stuff. I want it logged both ways for now.

Conceivably could be other good reasons to do this.

[alexanderdean]

Nice idea! To implement this we would introduce the idea of "named collectors". It would look something like this:

_snaq.push(['addCollectorCf', 'd3rkrsqld9gmqf', 'backup']);
_snaq.push(['addCollectorUrl', 'sp.mydomain.com', 'main']);
_snaq.push(['attachUserId', false, 'main']);

Still TBC which other configuration needed to be per-collector versus global - e.g. potentially:

_snaq.push(['enableActivityTracking', 10, 10, 'main']);

Note that this is a big restructuring of the tracker - everything about the current code assumes there is only one collector to configure and send to. Would need to wait on us having a JavaScript test suite.

Because this functionality does not exist, currently on snowplowanalytics.com we use a tag manager (GTM but Qubit works too) to send events to multiple SnowPlow collectors.

By way of comparison, here are the strengths and weaknesses of the tag manager approach:

• -ive - have to duplicate all event firings
• -ive - have to load sp.js twice
• +ive - allows each collector to work with a different version of sp.js (which is great for testing new versions of sp.js without losing data if there are issues)
• +ive - approach works today

/cc Yali (@yalisassoon) for any additional comments...

[alexanderdean]

See this excellent blog article on Universal Analytics' new tracker namespacing capabilities:

http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2013/05/ga-universal-analytics-properly-namespaced/

Note that the cookies are namespaceable too.

[alexanderdean]

Scheduled for 0.14.0

[alexanderdean]

Pushing back to 1.2.0 - this is a big feature. Design thoughts:

As a baseline - it's important that if you do not specify multiple collectors, then the API is exactly as today.

As soon as you specify multiple collectors, we need a way to specify which collectors a given event should be sent to. There are two basic approaches:

1. Flex arity - add an additional argument which specifies which collector(s) to send to
2. Overload event name - add a prefix to the event name to specify which collector to send to (this is what Google Analytics does)

Let's assume the user has defined three collectors:

_snaq.push(['addCollectorCf', 'd3rkrsqld9gmqf', 'backup']);
_snaq.push(['addCollectorUrl', 'sp.mydomain.com', 'main']);
_snaq.push(['addCollectorUrl', 'kinesis.mydomain.com', 'rt']);

Option 1: flex arity

The second argument is now the collector(s) to send the event to:

_snaq.push(['trackPageView', '*', 'my custom page title']); // Send to all collectors
_snaq.push(['trackStructEvent', 'backup', 'ecomm', 'add-to-basket']); // Send to backup only
_snaq.push(['trackStructEvent', ['main', 'rt'], 'ecomm', 'remove-from-basket']); // Send to main & rt only

Option 2: overload event name

This is what Google Analytics does:

_snaq.push(['trackPageView', 'my custom page title']); // Send to all collectors
_snaq.push(['backup.trackStructEvent', 'ecomm', 'add-to-basket']); // Send to backup only

_snaq.push(['main.trackStructEvent', 'ecomm', 'remove-from-basket']); // Send to main & rt only
_snaq.push(['rt.trackStructEvent', 'ecomm', 'remove-from-basket']); // Send to main & rt only

I suppose we could come up with a syntax so that you didn't have to push multiple times for multiple collectors:

_snaq.push(['main;rt.trackStructEvent', 'ecomm', 'remove-from-basket']); // Send to main & rt only

Option 3: GA/Grunt hybrid

Maybe it's nicer to copy Grunt argument syntax:

_snaq.push(['trackPageView', 'my custom page title']); // Send to all collectors
_snaq.push(['trackStructEvent:backup', 'ecomm', 'add-to-basket']); // Send to backup only
_snaq.push(['trackStructEvent:main;rt', 'ecomm', 'remove-from-basket']); // Send to main & rt only

/cc Yali (@yalisassoon) Fred Blundun (@fblundun) Simon Rumble (@shermozle) Robert Kingston (@kingo55) what do you folks reckon?

[alexanderdean]

Fred! I'm moving this forwards into 1.1.0 because a client has requested a pilot which depends on this feature. Hopefully you can test it alongside the other capabilities... /cc Yali (@yalisassoon)