I have been reading a bit about Firebase Analytics now, and because it is mostly an event-based data model, I assume one can not do screen tracking directly?
I was wandering whether one should then just pass the screen type/name as part of the event's parameter, or possibly as a user property (which I believe is a simpler way of calling custom dimensions) ? Thus all events that are fired on the 'Home' screen would have: content_type_Home=1 ?
Does someone have an answer for me, as well as a code example please ? Much appreciated :)
Until Screen Tracking and User Flows become available, the closest alternatives are :
To log a distinct event for each screen (e.g. "welcome_menu") and to use a Funnel to visualize the flow through a sequence of connected screens.
To log a single event (e.g. "screenview") and add a parameter that identifies the screen itself. Note that, since Funnels don't allow you to specify event parameters, you would only be able to view reporting on this through BigQuery at the moment.
To add on to Steve's answer: note that since Firebase only provides "open" funnels, this technique only works for a flow where users are forced to go from one screen to the next.
If a screen can be accessed from outside this particular flow, your funnel visualization will be messed up - since the number of users from within that flow and outside of it will be added together, potentially creating a conversion rate of more than 100%.
(That makes open funnels pretty useless IMO, except for very specific use cases.)
Related
I need to fetch a list of all the files in a user's box account, such that the list of files can then be displayed in a table view (iOS).
I have successfully implemented this by recursively using /folders/{folder id}/items on all the folder's in my user's box.
However, while this works, it's kind of dirty, seeing as how a request is made for each of the users's folders, which could be quite a large number.
Is there any way to get a list of all the files (it's no issue if folders are included, I can ignore those manually) available?
I tried implementing this using search, but I couldn't identify a value for the query parameter that returned everything.
Any help would be appreciated.
Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.
What you are looking for (recursive call through a Box account) is not available. We have enterprise customers will bajillions of files and millions of folders. Recursively asking for everything would take too long.
What we generally recommend is that you ask for as little as you can, and that you use multiple threads and anticipate what you'll need just a little bit, so that you can deliver a high-performance user-interface to your end-users.
For example ?fields=item_collection is expensive to retrieve, and can add a lot to a paylaod. It can double, or 10x the time that it takes to get back a payload from the Box API. Most UI's don't need to show all the items inside every folder. So they are better off asking for ?fields=.
You can make your application responsive to the user if you make the smallest possible call. Of course there is a balance. Mobile networks have high latency, and sometimes that next API call to show some extra thing is slow. But for a folder tree, you can get high performance by retrieving only the current level, displaying that, and then starting to fetch one-level down while the user is looking at the first level.
Same goes for displaying thumbnails. If a user drills into a folder and starts looking at thumbnails for pictures, there's a good chance they'll want to see other thumbnails in that same folder. Your app should anticipate that, and start to pull one or two extras down in the background. Yes, it means more API calls, but your users will give your app a higher rating for being fast.
I have a pretty good project task management system going in Microsoft Access, but one feature I'm still missing is some type of 'quick entry' like facility often found in many good productivity applications.
This is how it would work:
Scenario 1:
You're in another application, working on a few things, and you just remember something that needs to get done. You hit your predefined shortcut: CTRL + ALT + T (again, from outside Microsoft Access) and it brings up a small access form with a text box in to which you can type what needs to get done, e.g.
Inform key stakeholders of concerns regarding timeline
you hit return and that gets saved as a record in Microsoft Access instantly.
An alternative, and slightly more complex scenario...
Scenario 2:
As above, but you want to add further details besides the task name, such as the person you need to speak to, and a due date. The input in to the text box could look like this:
Inform #Sally of concerns regarding timeline >+3
Where '#' tells access to populate a field called 'Contact' with 'Sally' (unless it already exists) and '>+3' is interpreted by access to mean a due date 3 days from today.
How difficult are Scenario 1 and Scenario 2 to perform? What level of VBA/programming knowledge would be required?
Thanks,
I would say it requires a fair amount of confidence in VBA.
You need to register a global hot-key; that is, a keyboard-combination that can be captured from outside the Access application. It requires win-api calls. Here is some code.
You need to know where to place these calls. I believe you have to put them in a standard module, not in the form's class module. (I haven't double-checked this, it's late.)
You need to have a little understanding about what this code is doing. NEVER attempt to type this api-code - copy it from a reliable source, exactly as it is!! You don't need to fully understand the code, but you need to know how (and when) to call each function.
Once you've registered the hot-key then your VBA needs to bring your application to the front and display your form, and focus it. Reliably bringing the application to the front may also require api-calls.
Once your form is opened (and focused) you can have a button on it to parse the information in its textbox. However, if you are designing the form anyway, I would add checkboxes, comboboxes, etc., rather than trying to parse a complex sentence/ statement.
I am a student at a University. With the placement process going on, we have an internal placement website that shows updates and status about various companies I have applied to. Since the number of companies is too large it becomes cumbersome to scroll through the complete list to find information. Sometimes, I just miss some things. Now, to tackle this problem, here is what I want to do:
The data is in an HTML table. Each row shows information about one company: Some dates, Status(Not/Shortlisted/Applied), Some yes/no options etc. each in a different column. Once I open the page I want to be able to extract information about which companies I got shortlisted in, and in which ones I didn't make it.
What is the right technology to do this ? I am thinking of writing a Greasemonkey user script (I have never actually written any, but how hard could it be ?). What other options do I have?
Edit: I don't quite understand why this question has voted to be closed?
I just displayed a use case for something general: On opening a web page, automatically extracting information from the page and display it to the user. What is the easiest and sufficiently powerful way to achieve this?
Since you can't get access to the website's database, Greasemonkey would be your best automation approach. However, this task is likely to be over before you can get a decent script up from scratch.
Your best practical approach is to save the pages and/or copy and summarize the data in MS Excel, or equivalent.
~~~~~~~~~
Here at SO, We will not develop any but the simplest Greasemonkey scripts for you from scratch (unless they are fun somehow ;) ). But, you can sometimes get such help in the "Script requests forum" at userscripts.org.
In order for someone to help you, they will need:
A clear idea of exactly what data gets manipulated, and how.
Access to the target site. Or access to saved snapshots of the target pages. GM scripts are extremely dependent on the details of the target page.
"other option":
ctrl + F
enter shortlisted
enter
ctrl + G <--repeat last search
I'm experimenting with P2P on Flash, and I've come across a little hurdle that I'd like to clarify before moving forward. The technology itself (Flash) doesn't matter for this problem, as I think this problem occurs in other languages.
I'm trying to create a document that can be edited "live" by multiple people. Just like Google Docs pretty much. But I'm wondering, how would you suggest synchronizing everyone's text? I mean, should I message everyone with all the text in the text field every time someone makes a change? That seems very inefficient.
I'm thinking there has to be a design pattern that I can learn and implement, but I'm not sure where to start.
Optimally, the application should send the connected clients only the changes that have occurred to the document, and have some sort of buffer or error correction that can be used for retrieving earlier changes that may have been missed. Is there any established design pattern that deals with this type of issue?
Thanks,
Sandro
I think your "Optimally" solution is actually the one you should go for.
each textfield has a model, the model has a history (a FILO storing last, let's say, 10 values).
every time you edit that textfield you push the whole text into the model and send the delta to other connected clients.
as other clients receive the data they just pick the last value from the model and merge it to the received data.
you can refine the mechanism by putting an idle timer in the middle: as a user types something in the textfield you flag that model as "toBeSentThroughTheNet" and you start a timer. as the timer "ticks" (TimerEvent.TIMER) you stop it, collect the flagged data and send it to other clients. just remember to reset the timer everytime the user is actually typing (a semplification coul be keydown = reset, keyup = start).
one more optimization could be send the data packed in a compressed bytearray, but this requires you write your own protocol and may be not so an easy and quick path :)
If the requirement is that everyone can edit the document at the same time and the changes should be propagated to everyone and no changes should be lost, then it is a non-trivial problem. There are few different approaches out there, but one that is quite robust is Operational Transformation. This is the same algorithm that Google Docs uses for collaborative editing.
Understanding and Applying Operational Transformation and the attendant hacker news discussion are probably other good places to start.
The Wave Protocol was released as open source so you can take a look on how it is implemented.
You could of course forgo the tricky synchronization and just allow people to take turns and only one person can edit the document at a time and this person just pushes the changes to the remainder of the group.
For a major school project I am implementing a real-time collaborative editor. For a little background, basically what this means is that two(or more) users can type into a document at the same time, and their changes are automatically propagated to one another (similar to Etherpad).
Now my problem is as follows:
I want to be able to detect what changes a user carried out onto an HTML textfield. They could:
Insert a character
Delete a character
Paste a string of characters
Cut a string of characters
I want to be able to detect which of these changes happened and then notify other clients similar to "insert character 'c' at position 2" etc.
Anyway I was hoping to get some advice on how I would go about implementing the detection of these changes?
My first attempt was to consider the carot position before and after a change occurred, but this failed miserably.
For my second attempt I was thinking about doing a diff on the entire contents of the textfields old and new value. Am I missing anything obvious with this solution? Is there something simpler?
It is a really hard work make this working today, for several reasons, but
maybe you will need to restrict only to some browsers. read: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL/Attribute/oninput the alternative to "oninput" is listen to all input events (keyboard, mouse, dragdrop) I suggest to use "oninput"
html is not perfect... even html5. input and textareas supports only single-range
selections. you can solve this using designmode/contenteditable instead of
textareas/textfield
detecting offsets of what changed is a hard work: read
-- https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Document_Object_Model_%28DOM%29/window.getSelection
-- http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/range_intro.html -- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535869%28v=VS.85%29.aspx -- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535872%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
you may need a "diff" algorithm written in javascript! http://ejohn.org/projects/javascript-diff-algorithm/
one personal note: detecting words, characters changes may be totally non-sense and not useful, detect instead paragraphs changes, or in case of an excel-like worksheet, the single cell
I hope this helps
feel free to correct my English!
My pseudocode/written out response would be (if I understand your question exactly) to use jQuery to detect keyup events and then save the input to the server via ajax, then also take the response and post it back to the input. This isn't very efficient, but basically the idea is that you're constantly posting and checking what else has been posted. If you want to see what someone else is doing in real time, you can ping the server every second or so and update with the response.
All of this of course can be optimized, but it still is kind of taxing for a server. You could also see if you can implement Google Topeka Wave for your project, or get in touch with Google Topeka to see how they do it :)