Logging raw events

7 min

For a better understanding of what events are being logged in your App Analytics, it is possible to enable debug logging of raw tracking events.

It is only possible to enable this feature on the preview version of a Purple App or Purple Website.

Prerequisites

Web

Android

iOS

To setup the feature in iOS apps, the following requirements must be met

a device connected via USB with enabled safari inspector, see Inspecting the Purple Experience in iOS apps

a mac OS device with Safari and the Console app

Enabling and disabling logging

Open the web developer tools in your browser.

Web

Android

iOS

Depending on the browser, opening the developer tools might require different steps. Please see the documentation of the corresponding browser how to open them.

In the developer tools, open the console tab and paste the following line and then press enter:

purple.tracking.debug({logging: true})

This setting is persisted and stays enabled even after app restarts or the page reloads until the same command is executed with the value false instead of true.

Reading the logs

Web

Android

iOS

In web, these logs always start with [TRACK], so to only show these tracking events, it is recommended to type [TRACK] into the search field of the logs.

The logs appear in the same console where the command to enable logging was executed.

On Android, these logs always have the tag TRACK. This can be later used for filtering.

Logs are printed to Android's logcat. There are two ways to view these logs: Either the command line using adb or opening Android Studio with any project open and opening the logcat view.

Ensure that the app is connected via usb and usb debugging is enabled.

Using Android Studio:

open Android Studio

open any project to start the whole editor

a sample project will suffice

in the menu, select View -> Tool windows -> Logcat

on the top left, select the connected device

enter tag:TRACK to show only messages with such a tag

optional: enter package:<packagename> to limit these logs to the corresponding app where <packagename> has to be replaced with the actual package name of the app.

Using the command line:

Open the Terminal app and run the following command:

adb logcat TRACK:D "*":S

This command reads all the logs that have the tag TRACK on debug level and will silence the rest. See https://developer.android.com/tools/logcat for more details.

Structure of the logs

The logs have the same structure on all platforms, it following this pattern:

[TYPE] KEY PLACEHOLDERS

TYPE is one of ACTION, VIEW, PURCHASE and ATTRIBUTE which all correspond to the event types described in the following sections.

Action events

View events

Purchase events

Attributes

KEY is the key of the event as described in the above sections.

PLACEHOLDERS are key-value pairs of the placeholders available for the given event and their corresponding values.

Note that these events and their placeholders is just the raw data that is available and that does not mean that all those events are being sent to tracking services.

This data is meant to visualise the options one can use to configure the tracking_config.json, see Tracking Configuration and depending on that configuration and consent of the user, the final tracking data might be different.

Examples

Web

Android

iOS

Console app