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Mobile/Projects/Telemetry probes for Fennec UI elements

3,519 bytes removed, 22:48, 22 March 2014
→‎Technical details
{{bug|932092}} ships in Firefox 28, and allows for UI code to record telemetry events for analysis.
Canonical documentation lives here(though bear in mind that m-c is usually behind fx-team by a day):
https://ci.mozilla.org/job/mozilla-central-docs/Tree_Documentation/fennec/index.html
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/file/default/mobile/android/base/docs/index.rst
 
 
The concepts are:
 
=== Sessions ===
Sessions are essentially scopes. They are meant to give context to events; this allows events to be simpler and more reusable. Sessions are usually bound to some component of the UI, some user action with a duration, or some transient state.
 
For example, a session might be begun when a user begins interacting with the UI component, and stopped when the interaction ends. Or a session might encapsulate period of no network connectivity, the first five seconds after the browser launched, the time spent with an active download, or a guest mode session.
 
Sessions implicitly record the duration of the interaction.
 
A simple use-case for sessions is the bookmarks panel in about:home. We start a session when the user swipes into the panel, and stop it when they swipe away. This bookmarks session does two things: firstly, it gives scope to any generic event that may occur within the panel (e.g., loading a URL). Secondly, it allows us to figure out how much time users are spending in the bookmarks panel.
 
To start a session, call ''Telemetry.startUISession(String sessionName)''. Session names should be brief, lowercase, and should describe which UI component the user is interacting with. In certain cases where the UI component is dynamic, they could include an ID, essential to identifying that component. An example of this is with dynamic home panels, we use session names of the format "''homepanel:<panel_id>''" to identify home panel sessions.
 
To stop a session call ''Telemetry.stopUISession(String sessionName, String reason)''. ''sessionName'' is the name of the open session and ''reason'' is a descriptive cause for the ending. The reason field should capture why the user stopped interacting with the UI component. It should be brief, lowercase, and generic so it can be reused in different places. Examples reasons are:
* "switched" - user transitioned to a UI element of equal level
* "exit" - user left for an entirely different element.
 
=== Events ===
Events capture key occurrences. They should be brief and simple, and should not contain sensitive or excess information. Context for events should come from the session (scope). An event can be created with four fields (via ''Telemetry.sendUIEvent''): action, method, extras, and timestamp.
 
* '''action''': name of the event. Should be brief and lowercase. If needed, you can make use of namespacing with a '.' separator. Example event names: "panel.switch", "panel.enable", "panel.disable", "panel.install".
 
* '''method''' (Optional): used for user actions that can be performed in many ways. This field specifies the method in which the action was performed. For example, users can add an item to their reading list either by long-tapping the reader icon in the address bar, or from within reader mode. We would use the same event name for both user actions but specify two methods: "addressbar" and "readermode".
 
* '''extras''' (Optional): for extra information that may be useful in understanding the event. Make an effort to keep this brief.
 
* '''timestamp''' (Optional): time the event occurred. If not specified this field defaults to the current value of the realtime clock.
 
=== Clock ===
Times are relative to either elapsed realtime (an arbitrary monotonically increasing clock that continues to tick when the device is asleep), or elapsed uptime (which doesn't tick when the device is in deep sleep). We default to elapsed realtime.
 
See the documentation in http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/Telemetry.java for more.
== Research/references ==
Rnewman
Canmove, confirm
640
edits
Retrieved from "https://wiki.mozilla.org/Special:MobileDiff/955738"

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