Capturing streams of serializable events from browsers

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Clicks, short for click streams, enables applications to collect detailed telemetry about the events that occur within a browser. These events can range from literal mouse clicks, to history popstates, scrolling, touch events, gestures and everything in between. These events are collected as they are generated, and transformed into a form that cannot be mutated by other handlers and are easily serialized, often as JSON and sent to a server for further analysis.

Collection of events is simple:

var clicks = require('clicks');

clicks.attach().stream(function (event) {
	... fire hose ...
});

By default, the standard DOM level 3 events are captured. It's easy to customize what events are captured.

var clicks, dom3, touch;

clicks = require('clicks');
dom3 = require('clicks/events/dom3');
touch = require('clicks/events/touch');

clicks.attach(dom3.categories.mouse).attach(touch.types).stream(function (event) {
	... fire hose ...
});

In this example, we're collecting mouse events (click, mouseover, ...) and all touch events. Support for more event types will be added over time.

Users are interacting with your application in ways you're probably unaware, find out what you're missing.

Our goal is to work in every major browser. If your preferred browser is not supported, please let us know. Some features may not be available in all environments.

Historically, browsers implemented very different event models. Clicks favors using the standard addEventListener model, capturing events at the top of the DOM as they propagate towards the target. In other browsers, ::cough:: IE, the attachEvent model is used when addEventListener is not available. Events in the attachEvent cannot be captured as they enter the DOM, and instead bubble up from the target node. If an event is squelched, or modified, before it retches the top levels of the DOM, it will not be captured. Sorry, there isn't much we can do...

Tested browsers:

• Chrome (stable)
• Firefox (stable, LTS, should work in earlier versions)
• IE (6-10)
• Safari (6, should work in earlier versions)
• Opera (12, should work in earlier versions)

Clicks.js can be installed via npm, Bower, or from source.

To install without source:

$ npm install clicks

or

$ bower install clicks

From source:

$ npm install

Clicks is designed to run in a browser environment, utilizing AMD modules. curl is highly recommended as an AMD loader, although any loader should work.

An ECMAScript 5 compatible environment is assumed. Older browsers, ::cough:: IE, that do not support ES5 natively can be shimmed. Any shim should work, although we've tested against cujo's poly

Please report issues on GitHub. Include a brief description of the error, information about the runtime (including shims) and any error messages.

Feature requests are also welcome.

The test suite can be run in two different modes: in Node.js, or in a browser. We use npm and Buster.JS as the test driver, buster is installed automatically with other dependencies. Tests that execute within Node.js use PhantomJS as a headless browser.

Before running the test suite for the first time:

$ npm install

To run the suite in Node.js/PhantomJS:

$ npm test

To run the suite in a browser:

$ npm start
browse to http://localhost:8282/ in the browser(s) you wish to test.  It can take a few seconds to start.

• Scott Andrews [email protected]

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details on how to contribute to this project.

Clicks.js is made available under the MIT license. See LICENSE.txt for details.

Copyright (c) 2012 VMware, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto, CA 94304

0.1.1

• Captures History API events
• clicks.reset() will now flush the stream buffer
• Bower installable, with dependencies

0.1.0

• first release, everything is new