README¶ ↑

This README would normally document whatever steps are necessary to get the application up and running.

Things you may want to cover:

• Ruby version

• System dependencies

• Configuration

• Database creation

• Database initialization

• How to run the test suite

• Services (job queues, cache servers, search engines, etc.)

• Deployment instructions

• …

Please feel free to use a different markup language if you do not plan to run rake doc:app.

Java Script Snippets:

Create a JavaScript Snippet

Blocmetrics users must be able to track events using JavaScript snippets. There’s only one function your snippet needs to support:

blocmetrics.report(); When a browser executes the blocmetrics.report function, make an Ajax request to the server-side API to create the event on your server.

In order to keep your Blocmetrics code from colliding with other JavaScript code, you should create a namespace for it. The simplest way to do this is to declare an empty object. Open one of your previous projects and add this to its application.js file:

app/assets/javascripts/application.js

var blocmetrics = {};

Then create the report function as a property on that object:

app/assets/javascripts/application.js var blocmetrics = {};

blocmetrics.report = function(eventName){
  // your code here
};

Inside the report function, use a POST request to create the event. Assume that jQuery is not present, and use the Ajax functions that are native to web browsers instead (the XMLHttpRequest API).

Create an event with the name sale:

blocmetrics.report = function(eventName) {

// #1
var event = {event: { name: eventName }};

// #2
var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
// #3
request.open("POST", "http://localhost:3000/api/events", true);
// #4
request.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json');
// #5
request.send(JSON.stringify(event));

} At #1, we create an event JSON object to send to the Blocmetrics analytics service.

At #2, we initialize a new XMLHttpRequest() (AJAX request)

At #3, we set the HTTP method to POST, the url of our events endpoint, and allow the request to run asynchronously.

At #4, we set the request Content-Type header to ‘application/json’. Without that, our API::EventsController would not know to process the request as JSON.

At #5, we finally send the request.

Document this JavaScript snippet in the Blocmetrics README.md for future reference.