Setting up Properties
Last updated
Last updated
Sometimes you will want to attach data to events that isn't automatically captured by autotrack. There are several ways you can attach properties to events.
You can use the techniques below to capture properties like the search term when a user performs a search, or the price of an item when a user adds it to their shopping card. Here's a table of which methods are supported by which SDKs:
YES
no
no
no
YES
YES
no
no
YES
YES
YES
YES
no
YES
no
no
Property values are limited to 255 characters.
Dynamic Properties enable you to collect additional metadata via Freshpaint's Autotrack beyond what's automatically collected by default. Freshpaint's Dynamic Properties can grab any visible data on the page and attach that data to your events.
Dynamic properties do not require code to setup and are the easiest way to add additional data to events.
Examples of what you can collect with Dynamic Properties:
Collect Item Price, Item Name, and other data when a product is added to a user's cart
Collect search terms entered by your users when they execute a search
To add a dynamic property to an event, click Add Dynamic Property in the event definition dashboard which can be found by click on an individual event definition within the event library:
Specify the name of the property and a CSS selector that points to the element on the page with the information you want to capture. Whenever the event is triggered, Freshpaint will look up the element with the given CSS selector and attach the text of that element as a property to the event.
You may see read-only JavaScript type properties here, created by Freshpaint support.
JavaScript Dynamic Properties allow you to specify a JavaScript function body to set the property value, with the native event available as input. They also support suppressing delivery for configured destinations on this event, via the SUPPRESS_EVENT value.
Please contact support if you'd like to learn more about this capability.
Dynamic Properties are not retroactive at this time
Data layer properties are properties given to Freshpaint that are then attached to all Freshpaint events. Data layer properties allow you to attach additional, contextual information, to your events.
You can create data layer properties by using the addEventProperties, addPageviewProperties, andaddInitialEventProperties.
The addEventProperties function call creates a data layer property. That property will now be sent with all events going forward. As an example, you can call addEventProperties as follows:
The ab test variant property will now have the value a until removeEventProperty is called or addEventProperties is called with a new value of ab test variant. When you call addEventProperties with a new value of ab test variant, that value will overwrite the existing value.
See the API docs on addEventProperties for more information.
The addPageviewProperties call lets you create data layer properties that are sent until the user leaves the current page. Once the user leaves the current page, any properties created with addPageviewProperties will now longer be sent. As an example, the call:
will send the property product name with the value diamond ring and the property price with the value 100 as part of all events that occur on the current page. Once the user leaves the current page, the product name and price properties will no longer be sent. addPageviewProperties should be used for any properties that are specific to the page the user is currently on.
If you call addPageviewProperties you should call it as part of the Freshpaint snippet. Specifically you should call addPageviewProperties immediately after the freshpaint.init() call and before the call to freshpaint.page(). This ensures any pageview properties you set are attached to the pageview event created by Freshpaint.
See the docs on addPageviewProperties for more information.
The addInitialEventProperties call works like addEventProperties except it will not override a property if that property already has a value. As an example, if you want to attach the initial page a user landed on as a property, you can do that like so:
Now if you call addInitialEventProperties again with a different value of initial landing page, the property initial landing page will still be set to /article.
See the API docs on addInitialEventProperties for more information.
To remove a data layer property, you can call the removeEventProperty api method. The call
will stop sending the property pricing plan going forward.
If you send an event into Freshpaint with a manual track call, you can pass in a map of properties as the second argument:
See the API docs on freshpaint.track() for more information.
For React Native, Freshpaint will automatically capture a whitelist of properties from your React components. For a complete list of properties collected by Freshpaint, see the docs on what information is collected by the React Native SDK. You can also whitelist your own properties. You can use these properties to narrow down event definitions when defining events. For example, Freshpaint captures the title property of React Native buttons, allowing you to define a CSS selector like so:
To whitelist your own properties, attach a freshpaintOptions argument to the component class with the attributes you would like to whitelist or blacklist. For example, if you have a functional component like:
You can capture the arg property by adding the following bit of code:
If you are using a class component, you instead set the freshpaintOptions property of the class like so:
