Support SendBeacon?

[AutoSponge]

Could this support sendBeacon by default instead of fetch?

[vesparny]

It's something I was thinking about. Maybe using a polyfill like https://github.com/miguelmota/Navigator.sendBeacon would be great.

Do you want to send a pull request?

[joehand]

Haha I should have looked here earlier! I added server side support. Right now chrome doesn't accept json, see issue.

I tested this on the client and it worked with the above PR (I will leave the PR here for others).

try {
  var json = JSON.stringify(opts)
} catch (e) {
  console.log(opts)
  return Promise.reject(new Error('could not strigify data'))
}
var blob = new window.Blob([ json ], { type: 'text/plain; charset=UTF-8' })
return window.navigator.sendBeacon(url, blob)

[joehand]

FYI - In general, the json support for sendBeacon seems a bit broken and strangely implemented across browsers. See this issue for more discussion.

[AutoSponge]

@vesparny @joehand Based on that info, I'm not sure I should create a PR. The complications of falling back to fetch when sendBeacon fails (possibly due to a higher version client than server) tells me it might be better to just wait for that Chrome/FF impl to settle down, first. Or, the abstraction should go 1-level deeper, to the transport lib (e.g., instead of isomorphic-unfetch some lib that negotiates sendBeacon with fetch and XHR fallbacks).

Feel free to close this.

[benwiley4000]

I have something working for this using application/x-www-form-urlencoded instead of application/json (I also had to fork the fair-analytics server to support form encoded POST bodies, but it was a one-liner using bodyParser).

I haven't tested it across many browsers but it works for Chrome. I fall back to XMLHttpRequest (synchronous) if sendBeacon is unavailable. By default we use normal fetch and we only use sendBeacon/XHR if a guaranteeRequest flag is passed.

https://github.com/vesparny/fair-analytics-client-api/compare/master...d252c03

@joehand's suggestion of just using text encoding seems more obvious though and maybe better than form encoding? Not sure. At the moment I'm running the code above for my client currently since I need to be able to send events when the page unloads.

P.S. Now realizing maybe some folks are sending hierarchical analytics data in which case form encoding wouldn't cut it, so JSON-as-plain-text is probably better for that.

P.P.S. Note that unlike what @AutoSponge originally proposed, this doesn't use sendBeacon unconditionally. I don't think that's a great idea generally since there's no way to know if a sendBeacon request failed after being queued. Some folks might prefer to retry analytics on the client side if the network fails, so sendBeacon is really best reserved for last-minute-before-page-unload requests, I think.

[benwiley4000]

Just now reviewing my code, I realized I forgot to add a promise return value for the fallback XHR case, but I can add that if we want a PR.

[benwiley4000]

I updated my fork to use text-as-json and return a promise for the xhr response. https://github.com/vesparny/fair-analytics-client-api/compare/master...ea909c9