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React User Analytics

This library enables tracking of UI events when a user interacts with a React or React Native application.

Features

  • Progressive - Uses latest JavaScript features and design patterns for a React codebase.
  • Extensible - A modular architecture and usage of Dependency.Inversion patterns gives you flexibility and allows you to easily extend features.
  • TypeScript support.

A simple example

// import your component
import Button from 'Button';

import withTracking from 'react-user-analytics/index';

const ButtonWithTracking = withTracking(Button);

<ButtonWithTracking
    label="click me"
    trackers={[
    {
        action: 'onClick',
        track: handleLogEvent,
    },
  ]}
/>

Supported events

  • Form Events
    • onChange
  • Mouse Events
    • onClick
    • onHover

πŸ” Why this approach?

This project uses Higher-Order Components (HOCs) to wrap existing components with tracking logic β€” without modifying the components themselves.

By using HOCs:

  • βœ… No rewrites required – Existing components stay untouched.

  • 🧩 Plug-and-play tracking – Tracking logic is attached where needed, with minimal friction.

  • πŸ§ͺ A creative HOC experiment – This project explores how far we can take HOCs to inject behavior cleanly and declaratively.

  • 🧠 Customizable data structure – Gain precise control over how user interaction events are structured and sent, instead of being limited by black-box analytics tools.

This approach makes it easy to scale analytics across an application without tangling up UI code β€” just wrap and go.

Work in Progress

Eventually, the library will have exhaustive coverage and support for many more events, such as:

  • Wheel Events

  • Touch Events

  • Keyboard Events

  • Mouse Events

  • and more.

  • User Interaction journey mapping

  • Session Recording

Instructions of Usage

  1. First, import the library in your project.

  2. In-order to add user-tracking ability to your component or element, import the withTracking function (Higher-order component) and wrap the component. Here's an example using a simple Button component:

export const ButtonWithTracking = withTracking(Button)

ButtonWithTracking will have all the features and properties of the Button component, but with interaction-tracking superpowers!

  1. Finally, use ButtonWithTracking inside your app anywhere where you'd like to track user-events occurring on this component, such as onClick or onHover.
import Button from 'components/Button';
import { withTracking } from 'react-user-analytics/index';

const ButtonWithTracking = withTracking(Button);

function Home() {

    function handleClick(e: React.MouseEvent<HTMLElement, MouseEvent>) {
        // app logic goes here
    }

    function logEvent(
        event: React.MouseEvent<HTMLElement, MouseEvent>,
        interactionResource: UserInteractionResource
    ) {
        /*
            do whatever you want with the resource,
            like save it to IndexedDB, compress it, save it via API, etc
        */
        console.log(interactionResource);
    }

    return (
        <ButtonWithTracking
            type="text"
            onClick={handleClick}

            trackers={[
                // track onClick event
                {
                    action: "onClick", // event to track
                    track: logEvent, // callback function that runs whenever the event occurs
                }
            ]}
        >
    )
}

export default Home;

You can add multiple tracker objects within the trackers array if you need to track more than one event occurring within the component.

Advanced Usage

Mapping a user's journey

Use-case: Say you have 2 react components - a ButtonWithTracking configured to track onClick events, and a InputWithTracking component configured to capture onChange events. These components are being used in 2 different pages or templates in your application - a login form, and a newsletter subscription form.

In this scenario, it is useful to capture a global 'context' within which the events occur - such as the page or the container component details, and the app version. This information is useful to plot out the user's journey, which will give you a more contextual understanding of how the user navigates through your app.

  • Provide and capture contextual data using React Context Provider <DataContext.Provider>

    Using the <DataContext.Provider>, you can provide the global 'context' to your tracking components without having to pass them explicitly via props. Here's how:

    • Create a DataContext object.
const dataContext = {
    context: "Login Form",
    app: {
        version: "1",
    },
} as UserInteraction.DataContext;
  • Next, wrap your template or container component within DataContext.Provider and provide it the dataContext value:
import { withTracking, DataContext, UserInteractionResource } from 'react-user-analytics/index';
import Button from 'components/Button';

const ButtonWithTracking = withTracking(Button);

function LoginForm() {

    function logEvent(
        event: React.MouseEvent<HTMLElement, MouseEvent>,
        interactionResource: UserInteractionResource
    ) {
        console.log(interactionResource.app.version) // Will print "1"
        console.log(interactionResource.source.context); // Will print "Login Form"

    }

    return (
        <DataContext.Provider value={dataContext}> // Pass the dataContext value
            <ButtonWithTracking
                type="text"
                onClick={handleClick}

                trackers={[
                    // track onClick event
                    {
                        action: "onClick",
                        track: logEvent,

                        data: { // pass optional custom data
                            color: "blue",
                        }
                    }
                ]}
            >
        </DataContext.Provider>
    )
}

export default LoginForm;

This way, your tracking components nested anywhere within the provider will receive the dataContext object and will return it as part of the UserInteractionResource object.

  • Providing Data Context as regular props

If you don't want to provide data using DataContext.Provider or want to override it with a different value, you can pass them explicitly via props:

function LoginForm() {

    function logEvent(
        event: React.MouseEvent<HTMLElement, MouseEvent>,
        interactionResource: UserInteractionResource
    ) {
        console.log(interactionResource.app.version) // Will print "0"
        console.log(interactionResource.source.context); // Will print "Login Form"

    }

    return (
        <ButtonWithTracking
            type="text"
            onClick={handleClick}

            trackers={[
                // track onClick event
                {
                    action: "onClick",
                    track: logEvent,

                    data: { // pass optional custom data
                        color: "blue",
                    }
                }
            ]}

            dataContext={{ // Pass dataContext explicitly
                app: {
                    version: "0",
                },
                context: "Login Form"
            }}
        >
    )
}

export default LoginForm;

In-case you have both in your application, the data context passed via props will override the values from <DataContext.Provider>

API

React

  • Tracking Component Props

    The tracking-enabled component will accept all props required for the original component, along with the following:

    Props Required Description Type
    trackers Yes Each tracker object expects an action and track properties. Check the section below for the complete list of properties UserInteraction.Tracker[]
    origin Optional To provide some contextual information for the event origin string
    dataContext Optional an object property to provide context of the taken event UserInteraction.DataContext
  • UserInteraction.Tracker object properties

    Property Required Description Type
    action Yes Type of event that needs to be tracked (React Synthetic events). Can take values such as onClick, onChange string
    track Yes Callback that runs when above event occurs (e, interactionResource: UserInteractionResource) => void
    data Optional Can be used to provide some custom data. Accessible within UserInteractionResource.data Object<any>