Items support in Google Analytics Ecommerce events on React Native

[AndrewKMoses]

Hi

I am a bit confused around the support of items in the ecommerce Google Analytics events when using React Native and I'm hoping I can get some clarification.

So, I'm using Expo with the packages @react-native-firebase/app and @react-native-firebase/analytics.

I have managed to log some simple events and wanted to implement the add-to-cart event.

In this section of the documentation, there is a link to event methods, which unfortunately leads to a 404 page. However, I found out I can do a call like this for add-to-cart event.

logEvent(analytics, 'add_to_cart', {
        currency: item.currency ?? 'SEK',
        value: item.price ?? 0,
        items: [
            {
                affiliation: item.restaurantName ?? 'unknown',
                item_name: item.name ?? 'unknown',
                item_id: `${item.id}`,
                item_list_id: `${deliveryLocationId}`,
                quantity: 1,
                price: item.price ?? 0,
            },
        ],
    })

When looking at the data sent in the browser console, I noticed that the items array does not look correct. It appears as ep.items=%5Bobject+Object%5D. This also matches what I see in the event in Google Analytics:

I started digging around in the source code and ended up at this TODO, from over 1 year ago, to add support for items.

https://github.com/invertase/react-native-firebase/blame/e00bd876db750eeec13d9204be8b6603700b2a8d/packages/analytics/lib/web/api.ts#L283

I also tried using the deprecated logAddToCart, with the same result.

---

Long story short, what is the state of react-native-firebase for Analytics? It seems it's not really fully implemented yet, or am I missing something?

I did not manage to find any similar issues / questions, do people use other frameworks than Firebase when integrating Google Analytics to a React Native app?

[AndrewKMoses]

@mikehardy

Could you please shed some light on this? Is this only on an issue for the web version? If so, would you accept a PR for it?

[mikehardy]

Hey @AndrewKMoses sorry for the delay, thank you for your patience. We would happily accept a PR for this - at any given time any of the modules here are fully implemented for some past release of the underlying SDKs, but - a happy problem - firebase is continuously adding new functionality and creating new gaps for us. We gratefully accept PRs to close those gaps and do our best ourselves to close them of course but don't have infinite resources. Same story for every software project I suppose - but with open source at least you can directly impact the any gap that directly affects you if so motivated. I believe analytics was just converted to typescript so is hopefully a bit easier to work on now as well (no need to worry about changing a types file and a source file etc...)

[AndrewKMoses]

@mikehardy What about the broken link? I have not been able to find out what the correct URL is.

In this section of the documentation, there is a link to event methods, which unfortunately leads to a 404 page. However, I found out I can do a call like this for add-to-cart event.

[mikehardy]

Indeed @AndrewKMoses that's an unfortunate side effect of the typescript migration - the migrated modules which includes analytics have a related publishing error for the reference docs. There's a PR open to fix it and now that I've fixed #8829 I'll look into getting the reference docs back up

• docs(analytics): add analytics type declaration file to fix its absence in the reference API on the docs website #8825

In the meantime, know that the reference docs are built from the source. So you may always consult the source directly for the comments that the docs are built from:

https://github.com/invertase/react-native-firebase/blob/main/packages/analytics/lib/types/analytics.ts

...in the Github Web UI at least it is nearly as cross-linked and clickable as the reference site and should help until that's back up. Apologies for the hassle