Getting started

Designing how and what to track in your app is an important decision. Check out our docs about tracking design here.

The following steps will guide you through setting up the Flutter tracker in your project and tracking a simple event.

Installation#

Add the Snowplow tracker as a dependency to your Flutter application:

flutter pub add snowplow_tracker

This will add a line with the dependency to your pubspec.yaml:

dependencies:
  snowplow_tracker: ^0.8.0

Import the package into your Dart code:

import 'package:snowplow_tracker/snowplow_tracker.dart'

Installation on Web#

If using the tracker within a Flutter app for Web, you will also need to import the Snowplow JavaScript Tracker in your index.html file. Please load the JS tracker with the Snowplow tag as described here. Do not change the global function name snowplow that is used to access the tracker – the Flutter APIs assume that it remains the default as shown in documentation.

Make sure to use JavaScript tracker version 3.5 or newer. You may also refer to the example project in the Flutter tracker repository to see this in action.

Initialization#

Instantiate a tracker using the Snowplow.createTracker function. At its most basic, the function takes two required arguments: namespace and endpoint. Tracker namespace identifies the tracker instance, you may create multiple trackers with different namespaces. The endpoint is the URI of the Snowplow collector to send the events to. This tracker creation is asynchronous and uses the await keyword; therefore it must occur inside a function labelled async. You could create the tracker in the main() of your main widget.

SnowplowTracker tracker = await Snowplow.createTracker(
    namespace: 'ns1',
    endpoint: 'http://...'
);

// Creating a tracker in the main() function
// It is passed to the other widgets as necessary
Future<void> main() async {
  WidgetsFlutterBinding.ensureInitialized();

  SnowplowTracker tracker = await Snowplow.createTracker(
      namespace: "namespace",
      endpoint: "http://0.0.0.0:9090");

  runApp(MyApp(tracker: tracker));
}

There are additional optional arguments to configure the tracker. To learn more about configuring how events are sent, check out this page.

Tracking events#

To track events, simply instantiate their respective types (e.g., ScreenView, SelfDescribing, Structured) and pass them to the tracker.track or Snowplow.track methods.

tracker.track(ScreenView(
    id: '2c295365-eae9-4243-a3ee-5c4b7baccc8f',
    name: 'home',
    type: 'full',
    transitionType: 'none'));

Visit documentation about tracking events to learn about other supported event types. You may also want to read about adding more data to tracked events.

Testing#

Testing that your event tracking is properly configured can be as important as testing the other aspects of your app. It confirms that you are generating the events you expect.

We recommend using Snowplow Micro for testing and debugging — you can even use it for automated tests.