Codevoid.Utilities.Mixpanel 1.1.0

MixpanelCppCX

Introduction

MixpanelCppCX is a client for the Mixpanel analytics service. It has been built to handle the common situations of uploading events to the service. It supports batching, persisting-to-storage-before-uploading, and super properties. It's intended to be consumed by any UWP app — but the original motivation was to support JavaScript applications.

How to get it

MixpanelCppCX is published as a NuGET package (Codevoid.Utilities.Mixpanel) to the NuGET.org feed — just add it to your UWP Project in Visual Studio, and it'll be available for use in your code.

Things to note

• Items awaiting to upload are stored in a folder in your applications private data folder with in local settings. (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\<PackageIdentity>\LocalState\MixpanelUploadQueue)
• Items awaiting upload are written to disk after 500ms of idle time, or when there are 10 or more items in the queue — whichever comes first.
• Items are uploaded in batches of 50, unless one item in the batch fails, then they're uploaded 1 at a time.
• The queue is paused automatically when being suspended, and resumed when... resumed.

Usage

Sending a simple event

1. Create an instance of Codevoid.Utilities.Mixpanel, and hold on to it.

var mixpanelClient = new Codevoid.Utilities.Mixpanel(<Mixpanel API Token>)

2. Call, and wait for, .InitializeAsync()
3. Call .Start() on that instance to start processing the queue.
4. Call .Track("MyEvent", null) to log a single event

If you need to send properties with your event you can use Windows.Foundation.Collections.PropertySet, and insert your properties as needed, passing it as the second parameter to Track:

var properties = new Windows.Foundation.Colllections.PropertySet();
properties.add("MyProperty", "MyValue");
properties.add("MyOtherProperty", 9);

mixpanelClient.Track("MyOtherEvent", properties);

Adding a super property

Assuming you have an instance of MixpanelClient, you can set super properties with three data types -- String, Double, and Boolean:

mixpanelClient.SetSuperProperty("PropertyName", "PropertyValue");
mixpanelClient.SetSuperPropertyAsDouble("DoublePropertyName", 3.14);
mixpanelClient.SetSuperPropertyAsBoolean("BooleanPropertyName", false);

Note: if you're using a language that supports overloading (C++, C#), then you don't need the extra names -- just .SetSuperProperty.

Once set, the super properties will attached to every event when logged, automatically. This is useful for tracking against a single user, for example.

API

MixpanelClient(String token) (Constructor)

Creates an instance of the class, and uses the supplied token to make the requests to Mixpanel.

var mixpanelClient = new Codevoid.Utilities.MixpanelClient("YOUR TOKEN HERE");

Parameters

token — The token passed to the service with your events (required)

Properties

bool AutomaticallyAttachTimeToEvents

By default, all events have a time attached to them to indicate the order of the events, even if they're uploaded to the service out of order.

This property allows these to be disabled if you have your own way in which you set the time.

If you wish to override the time for a single event, include a property named "time" in the payload.

mixpanelClient.AutomaticallyAttachTimeToEvents = false;

bool DropEventsForPrivacy

When enabled, and even is tracked, it is immediately dropped, and never uploaded to the service. Intended to ube used in situations where the consumer offers a choice to their users about turning off all telemetry logging. With this option set, you can still call track, but nothing happens - it's immediately dropped.

Note, if you have events queued at this point they'll continue to be processed.

mixpanelClient.DropEventsForPrivacy = true;

Methods

IAsyncAction InitializeAsync()

Initializes the instance to be ready to process events, but does not start processing them. This gets the queue folder locally, and loads any unsent items from a previous session.

mixpanelClient.InitializeAsync().done(...);

void Track(String name, IPropertySet properties)

Adds the event with the supplied name & properties (in addition to any super properties) to the upload queue. It is not sent immediately, and there are no promises/events to know when it's made it to the service.

mixpanelClient.Track("LoggedIn", null);

Parameters

name — Name of the event that is being logged (required) properties — Any additional properties you would like to log with this event (optional)

void StartTimedEvent(string name)

Starts a timing the duration of an event. After this, if an event is tracked through Track with the same name, a duration property will be attached to the event when tracked.

mixpanelClient.StartTimedEvent("LoggedIn");

Parameters

name — Name of the event that the duration is to be tracked (required)

void SetSuperProperty(String name, [String/Double/Boolean] value)

Sets a super property on the class, that is persisted across instances. You can store string's, doubles, and booleans. When consuming this from JavaScript, you need to use the named versions of this method: SetSuperPropertyAsDouble for doubles, and SetSuperPropertyAsBoolean for, obviously, Booleans.

mixpanelClient.SetSuperProperty("ASuperProperty", "SuperValue");

Parameters

name — Name of the property that is to be set (required) value — Value to be set for the supplied name (required)

string/double/bool GetSuperPropertyAsString/Double/Boolean(string name)

Retrieves a value from the super property storage, and returns it to the caller.

Since they're all different only in their return type, and accept the same parameters, they're named differently based on their datatype.

var currentValue = mixpanelClient.GetSuperProperty("ASuperProperty");

Parameters

name — Named super property to retrieve.

bool HasSuperProperty(string name)

Checks if a super property has been set & has a value.

if(mixpanelClient.HasSuperProperty("ASuperProperty")) {
    console.log("ASuperProperty has been set");
}

name — Property to check for being set.

void RemoveSuperProperty(string name)

Removes a super property from the set of super properties. If the property isn't set, then the method returns silently.

mixpanelClient.RemoveSuperProperty("ASuperProperty");

Parameters

name — Property to remove.

void ClearSuperProperties()

Clears all currently set super properties.

mixpanelClient.ClearSuperProperties();

void Start()

Starts processing any events that are queued.

mixpanelClient.Start();

IAsyncAction PauseAsync()

Drains the queue to storage, and stops processing any events pending upload to the service.

Once you're ready to process events again, call Start().

mixpanelClient.PauseAsync().done(...);

IAsyncAction ClearStorageAsync()

Removes any events that have been queued to storage, but have not been uploaded to the service yet.

mixpanelClient.ClearStorageAsync().done(...);