Random order of events & too many => sort and group

[hpvd]

Sometimes one uses events to track multiple things of same type on one page and all these events are triggered at once. A typical example is the tracking of field validation process within a web-form (formular) One wants to understand which fields are hard to use/understand for website-users.

Typically validation is done when user clicks "send"-button. At this moment, all validation failures (empty or improper values in fields) shoot a message to the user and an "event" to Piwik. In addition there may be also an other event triggered by send button...

Doing this one got two problems

• Visitor log may get blown up because of large numbers of events (some users even need several attempts to get everything fine...)
• the shown events in visitor log are in random order which make it sometimes really hard to understand what's going on here:
  • events are in different order within two identical validation processes (different users with same behaviour)
  • events are in different order within two send attempts of one user
  • events order is not the same as order of fields on website

---

The result in visitor log may look like this:

first attempt of user to send the web-form:

• event "failure field 2"
• event "failure field 5"
• event "failure field 3"
• event "send button"
• event "failure field 1"
• event "failure field 6"
• event "failure field 4"

second attempt

• event "failure field 4"
• event "failure field 1"
• event "failure field 2"
• event "send button"
• event "failure field 5"

=> one can not identify easily which and how many things were corrected and solved already by the user

For another user, this may have a complete different order...

---

So the idea to solve this, is to give

• a possibility to group events
• a possibility to sort events

---

with this it may look like

first attempt

• event group "send and validate (7 events)[+]"

and unfolded:

• events group "send and validate (7 events)[-]"
  • event "failure field 1"
  • event "failure field 2"
  • event "failure field 3"
  • event "failure field 4"
  • event "failure field 5"
  • event "failure field 6"
  • event "send button"

and second attempt

• events group "send and validate (5 events)[+]"

and unfolded:

• events group "send and validate (5 events)[-]"
  • event "failure field 1"
  • event "failure field 2"
  • event "failure field 4"
  • event "failure field 5"
  • event "send button"

[hpvd]

How could this be achieved: one need two additional options to pass for an event, which should of course be optional trackEvent(category, action, [name], [value]) => trackEvent(category, action, [name], [value], [group],[order-ID])

another or additional way would be to find a possibility to automatically sort events in vistor-log in same order as they are within website code...

[mattab]

Hi @hpvd For your particular use case described here, ideally it should "just work" in Piwik. Assuming you track events in the correct order, either on different time (ie. 1+ second apart), or in a bulk tracking request (where the array of request is in the chronological order), then Piwik should store events in the order of creation, and display them in visitor log in this order. How do you track the events? could you maybe create small HTML file that reproduces the issue?