Clean Analytics

A simple library to prevent coupling your codebase to a particular analytic SDK. It also adds support for multiple analytics clients.

WIP: It's still a work in progress. The library is compeleted but no sample yet.

Possible things to be tracked by analytics can be grouped into three events. An event tag is a unique string that identifies the event.

• Content View Events

  Content view events are those events are logged each time a user visits a particular screen. A screen here can be an activity, fragment, dialog, etc. These events like all other events have a unique tag. They also have another property, the name of the (Java or Kotlin) class associated with that screen. The base class for events of this type is the ContentView class. The ContentView class has two public methods:

  • getName - which should return a String of the event tag
  • getClassName - which should return a String of the class name associated with the screen in question

  An example of the content view event for an e-commerce app would be to view the cart screen. Let's give it a tag of view_cart

  class ViewSendMoneyEvent  : ContentViewEvent() {
      override fun getName(): String {
          return "view_cart"  //the tag of the view event
      }
  }

  Note The getClassName. method is open and we don't need to override for every subclass because we have a helper class, ClassNameHelper that detects the name of the class where the event is logged automatically

• Custom Events

  Custom events are just any other events that are not ContentView events. They could be interactions like clicking a button or performing an action in the app like logging in, completing a transaction, etc. These events like all other events have a unique tag. Some may go with some extra information. In the case of performing a transaction, such extra information could be the amount of the transaction. The extra information associated with a custom event are the parameters The base class for the event type is the CustomEvent class. The CustomEvent class has two public methods:

  • getEventName - which should return a String of the event tag.
  • getParameters - which should return a Map<String, Any> of the parameters associated with the event.

  An example of a custom event for an e-commerce app would be to add an item to the cart. Let's give it a tag of add_to_cart and two parameters, item_id and item_amount

  class AddToCartEvent(private val itemId: String,
                              private val itemAmount: String) : CustomEvent() {
      override fun getEventName(): String {
          return "add_to_cart" //the tag of the event
      }
  
      override fun getParameters(): MutableMap<String, Any> {
          return hashMapOf(
                  Pair("item_id", itemId),
                  Pair("item_amount", itemAmount)
          )
      }
  }

• User properties

  User properties are just data that you want to track that are specific to a user. For example, their user ID, etc. It's recommended to track generic data like user ID and not data that's sensitive. The base class for the event type is the UserProperty class.

  An example of a user property event for an e-commerce app would be to track the user ID. This can be defined as follows:

  class UserIdProperty(private val userId: String) : UserProperty {
      override fun getKey(): String {
          return "user_id"
      }
  
      override fun getValue(): String {
          return userId
      }
  }

Things left to do

• Add a sample app
• Create Analytics clients for the popular analytic libraries
• Publish library