dispatch:fast-track

A Meteor package that provides an easy way of tracking everything that happens to an entity, over time and across various servers and apps.

FastTrack allows you to:

• log events to your Mongo database by entity type and ID, or just by type.
• log from server or client code.
• add a hyperlink and arbitrary data to the event you log
• easily display all events for a type or type+id on the client

Installation

$ meteor add dispatch:fast-track

Usage

Log an Event By Type

1FastTrack.log({
2  type: 'reminderEmails',
3  message: 'Sent'
4});

Log an Event By Type and ID

1FastTrack.log({
2  type: 'widget',
3  id: '1',
4  message: 'Created'
5});

Add More Details

Add time to log a time other than the default of now:

1FastTrack.log({
2  time: new Date(Date.now() - 60000)
3});

Add link to store a link to more information about this event:

1FastTrack.log({
2  link: 'https://my.domain.com/widgets/1'
3});

Add data to store any arbitrary data related to this event:

1FastTrack.log({
2  data: {
3    createdBy: someUserId
4  }
5});

Get All Events By Type

1let events = FastTrack.get({type: 'reminderEmails'});

Get All Events By Type and ID

1let events = FastTrack.get({type: 'widget', id: '1'});

Do Some Other Query

The MongoDB collection is exported as FastTrack.Collection, so you can query it as needed.

Read or Write Events from Client Code

If you want to use FastTrack.log or FastTrack.get in client code, you must first call FastTrack.configure in server code and provide read and write security functions that return true if it should be allowed.

1FastTrack.configure({
2  allowWrite: (userId, info) => { return !!userId; },
3  allowRead: (userId, selector) => { return !!userId; },
4});

On the client, FastTrack.log takes an optional callback if you need to make sure that the logging succeeded.

Also, for FastTrack.get() to be able to return results, you will need to subscribe to the necessary data first. You can use FastTrack.subscribe to do this:

1FastTrack.subscribe({type: 'user', id: '1'}, () => {
2  let events = FastTrack.get({type: 'user', id: '1'});
3})

Display Events in Client HTML

To render a report:

{{> FastTrackReport type="user" id="1"}}

The report has no styles applied so you can skin it to match your UI.

FastTrackReport will automatically subscribe to the necessary data. Just make sure you have set an allowRead function in your server code by calling FastTrack.configure.

Use an alternative MongoDB database

You may not want to store so many logs in your main app database. FastTrack allows you to specify a different MongoDB URL to use for the fast_track collection by setting environment variables:

FAST_TRACK_MONGO_URL
FAST_TRACK_MONGO_OPLOG_URL

FAST_TRACK_MONGO_OPLOG_URL is optional but recommended if you are publishing and displaying the logs on clients.