meteor-events

Internal event tracking for Meteor apps

(Note: this package doesn't actually exist yet. This is just the specs/documentation)

About

meteor-events lets you easily track events in your Meteor app, storing them in an Events.collection collection.

This is different from libraries such as analytics.js, which send your events to a third-party service.

meteor-events's purpose is to centralize your events and send them to your own database, so you can use them in your app (for example, to count how many times a user has done an action).

Of course, you can then easily add a callback to also propagate the events you track to services like Mixpanel or Google Analytics.

Install

meteor add telescope:events

Events

Events have the following properties:

• createdAt (Date): When the event happened. Defaults to the current timestamp.
• name (String): The event's name.
• description (String) [optional]: A description of the event.
• unique (Boolean) [optional]: Whether the event is unique. Unique events can only be logged once. Defaults to false.
• uniquePerUser (Boolean) [optional]: Whether the event is unique per user. Unique events can only be logged once per user. Defaults to false.
• important (Boolean) [optional]: Whether the event is important. Important events are never deleted. Defaults to false.
• log (Boolean): Whether to log the event in the database. Defaults to true.
• type (String): client or server.
• userId (String) [optional]: The _id of the user triggering the event, if available. Required if uniquePerUser is true.
• properties (Object) [optional]: The event's properties.

On the client, userId will default to Meteor.userId(). On the server, it needs to be specified.

Methods

• Events.track() (Client/Server): tracks an event.
• Events.purge() (Server): deletes all events from the database, except those marked as important.

Callbacks

• Events.onTrack(function (event) {...}): declare a callback to execute whenever an event is tracked.

Plugins

Plugins can let you transparently extend the package with different analytics solutions. For example adding events-ga would propagate events to Google Analytics, events-segmentio would add Segment.io, and so on.

Example

Events.track({
  name: 'signedUp',
  uniquePerUser: true,
  userId: Meteor.user(),
  properties: {
    plan: 'Premium', 
    ip: '123.456.789.123'
  }
})

Other Resources

• https://github.com/keen/common-web
• https://segment.com/libraries/analytics.js/