Almost everything on this group is a question, and not a discussion,
so I thought I'd do something a little different. Here I share a
little code that I put together yesterday.
I have a general-purpose extension of the Android Application class,
where I put together useful capabilities that all of my projects tend
to share in common.
I recently added the Google Analytics for Mobile SDK jar file to my
application class. (This could be done to an activity class as well.)
I implemented the following methods to support the tracker easily in
the rest of my app's activities.
GoogleAnalyticsTracker tracker = null;
public void trackApp(String identifier)
{
if (tracker != null) return;
tracker = GoogleAnalyticsTracker.getInstance();
tracker.start(identifier, this);
}
public void trackActivity(String activity)
{
if (tracker != null)
tracker.trackPageView("/" + shortAppName() + "/" + activity);
}
public void trackEvent(String event, String arg1, int arg2)
{
if (tracker != null)
tracker.trackEvent(shortAppName(), event, arg1, arg2);
}
public void dispatchTracker()
{ if (tracker != null) tracker.dispatch(); }
I just throw the Analytics JAR file in my project's lib/ folder, add
the library to the Eclipse project, and now I can call these methods
to track events and activity invocations. Simple enough.
There is one problem with this approach, and that is now a dependence
on an import of the GoogleAnalyticsTracker class, and therefore a
dependence on the Analytics JAR file in all of the projects that use
these methods.
Since my general-purpose class may be used by some other projects that
do not need Analytics, I thought I'd make these methods detect the JAR
file at runtime, rather than require the JAR in every project.
So I use the Java "reflection" mechanisms to detect if the JAR is
available, and if so, to indirectly invoke the methods instead. If
the JAR is not present, then I decided that calling these methods
should just do nothing.
Here are the same methods, written to make Analytics an optional
component. Some people may complain that it adds a lot of bloat to
the projects that don't use those features, but the difference in
size is equivalent to a very small PNG drawable file.
Object tracker = null;
private final Method gat_trackPageView;
private final Method gat_trackEvent;
private final Method gat_dispatch;
private final Method gat_stop;
/**
* Register the app for analytics tracking on application startup.
* @param activity the Google Analytics "web property ID" for app
*/
public void trackApp(String identifier)
{
if (tracker != null) return;
try
{
String classname =
"com.google.android.apps.analytics.GoogleAnalyticsTracker";
Class<?> gat = Class.forName(classname);
Class<?>[] argTypes = null;
Method tracker_getInstance = gat.getMethod("getInstance",
argTypes);
Object[] args = null;
tracker = tracker_getInstance.invoke(null, args);
argTypes = new Class<?>[] { String.class, Context.class };
Method tracker_start = gat.getMethod("start", argTypes);
args = new Object[] { identifier, this };
tracker_start.invoke(tracker, args);
//
argTypes = new Class<?>[] { String.class };
gat_trackPageView = gat.getMethod("trackPageView", argTypes);
argTypes = new Class<?>[] { String.class, String.class,
String.class, Integer.TYPE };
gat_trackEvent = gat.getMethod("trackEvent", argTypes);
argTypes = null;
gat_dispatch = gat.getMethod("dispatch", argTypes);
gat_stop = gat.getMethod("stop", argTypes);
}
catch (Exception e)
{
// ignored if the GoogleAnalyticsTracker jar is not found
Log.w(shortAppName() +
"GoogleAnalyticsTracker not available. No tracking.");
tracker = null;
}
}
/**
* Track the user's use of a given activity (or any string).
* @param activity the name of the activity to be logged
*/
public void trackActivity(String activity)
{
if (tracker == null) return;
final Object[] args = { null };
String page = "/" + shortAppName() + "/" + activity;
args[0] = page;
try { gat_trackPageView.invoke(args); }
catch (Exception e) { ; }
}
/**
* Track an event that occurs in the application.
* @param event the name of the event
* @param arg1 an arbitrary string to be categorized
* @param arg2 an arbitrary integer to be summed
*/
public void trackEvent(String event, String arg1, int arg2)
{
if (tracker == null) return;
final Object[] args = { null, null, null, null };
args[0] = shortAppName();
args[1] = event; args[2] = arg1; args[3] = new Integer(arg2);
try { gat_trackEvent.invoke(tracker, args); }
catch (Exception e) { ; }
}
/**
* Post all pending tracking messages as network is available.
*/
public void dispatchTracker()
{
if (tracker == null) return;
try { gat_dispatch.invoke(tracker, (Object[])null); }
catch (Exception e) { ; }
}
/**
* End the tracking of the application on app shutdown.
*/
public void stopTracker()
{
if (tracker == null) return;
try { gat_stop.invoke(tracker, (Object[])null); }
catch (Exception e) { ; }
tracker = null;
}
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