Collecting data with Trackers and Webhooks

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Getting started

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Designing how and what to track in your app is an important decision. Check out our docs about tracking design here.

The following steps will guide you through setting up the Flutter tracker in your project and tracking a simple event.

Installation

Add the Snowplow tracker as a dependency to your Flutter application:

flutter pub add snowplow_tracker

Code language: Bash (bash)

This will add a line with the dependency like to your pubspec.yaml:

dependencies:
    snowplow_tracker: ^0.1.0

Code language: YAML (yaml)

Import the package into your Dart code:

import 'package:snowplow_tracker/snowplow_tracker.dart'

Code language: Dart (dart)

Installation on Web

If using the tracker within a Flutter app for Web, you will also need to import the Snowplow JavaScript Tracker in your index.html file. Please load the JS tracker with the Snowplow tag as described in the official documentation. Do not change the global function name snowplow that is used to access the tracker – the Flutter APIs assume that it remains the default as shown in documentation.

Make sure to use JavaScript tracker version 3.2 or newer. You may also refer to the example project in the Flutter tracker repository to see this in action.

Initialization

Instantiate a tracker using the Snowplow.createTracker function. You may create the tracker in the initState() of your main widget. At its most basic, the function takes two required arguments: namespace and endpoint. Tracker namespace identifies the tracker instance, you may create multiple trackers with different namespaces. The endpoint is the URI of the Snowplow collector to send the events to.

SnowplowTracker tracker = await Snowplow.createTracker(
    namespace: 'ns1',
    endpoint: 'http://...'
);

Code language: Dart (dart)

There are additional optional arguments to configure the tracker. To learn more about configuring how events are sent, check out this page.

Tracking events

To track events, simply instantiate their respective types (e.g., ScreenView, SelfDescribing, Structured) and pass them to the tracker.track or Snowplow.track methods.

tracker.track(ScreenView(
    id: '2c295365-eae9-4243-a3ee-5c4b7baccc8f',
    name: 'home',
    type: 'full',
    transitionType: 'none'));

Code language: Dart (dart)

Visit documentation about tracking events to learn about other supported event types. You may also want to read about adding more data to tracked events.

Testing

Testing that your event tracking is properly configured can be as important as testing the other aspects of your app. It confirms that you are generating the events you expect.

We provide two types of pipeline for testing and debugging. Snowplow Mini is especially useful in manual schema and pipeline testing. Snowplow Micro is a minimal pipeline designed to be used as part of your app’s automated test suite.

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If you’d like to learn more about Snowplow BDP you can book a demo with our team, or if you’d prefer, you can try Snowplow technology for yourself quickly and easily.