Navigation & Lifecycle Tracking

Introduction#

When debugging your application, understanding how users navigate through your app and how different components of your app are initialized and destroyed is crucial. Measure provides automatic tracking of many lifecycle events in your application, allowing you to gain insights into user journeys and component lifecycles without writing additional code. There is also an option to manually track screen views if you need more control over what is tracked.

For Android, Lifecycle events for Activity, Fragments and from AndroidX navigation library (including compose) are automatically tracked.

For iOS, lifecycle events for View Controllers are automatically tracked. For SwiftUI, you can track lifecycle events by wrapping your views with MsrMoniterView or using the moniterWithMsr extension.

Application foregrounded and backgrounded events are also automatically tracked, allowing you to understand when the application is visible to the user and when it is not.

Apart from these automatically collected events, trackScreenView method can be used to manually track screen views in your application. This is useful for getting a more detailed view of user's journey depending on how your app is structured.

Application foregrounded/backgrounded#

Measure automatically tracks when the application has come to foreground (is visible to the user) and when it has been put into background (is no longer visible to the user).

Lifecycle events#

Android#

Activity Lifecycle

Measure automatically tracks the following Activity lifecycle events:

  1. Created
  2. Resumed
  3. Paused
  4. Destroyed

Fragment Lifecycle

Measure automatically tracks the following Fragment lifecycle events:

  1. Attached
  2. Resumed
  3. Paused
  4. Detached

AndroidX Navigation

If you rely on AndroidX Navigation library for navigation in your Android app, a screen_view event is automatically tracked whenever a new destination is navigated to. This works using the instrumentation added by Measure Gradle Plugin and no code changes are needed to track these events.

iOS#

View Controller Lifecycle

Measure automatically tracks the following View Controller lifecycle events:

  1. viewDidLoad
  2. viewWillAppear
  3. viewDidAppear
  4. viewWillDisappear
  5. viewDidDisappear
  6. didReceiveMemoryWarning
  7. initWithNibName
  8. initWithCoder

[!TIP]

You can also track loadView and deinit/dealloc by inheriting from MsrViewController for swift and MSRViewController for ObjC. An example of how to do this is shown below.

Using Swift:

   class ViewController: MsrViewController {
     ...
   }

Using Objective-C:

   @interface ObjcDetailViewController: MSRViewController
    ...
   @end

SwiftUI lifecycle

Measure can track SwiftUI component's onAppear and onDisappear if you wrap your view with the MsrMoniterView. It ensures that each appearance event is only triggered once per lifecycle instance. Additionally, you can use the moniterWithMsr extension to conveniently wrap any SwiftUI view.

Example usage:

Using MsrMoniterView:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        MsrMoniterView("ContentView") {
            Text("Hello, World!")
        }
    }
}

Using moniterWithMsr:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Text("Hello, World!")
            .moniterWithMsr("ContentView")
    }
}

Manually track screen views#

If you want to manually track screen views in your application, you can use the trackScreenView method. This is useful when you want to track specific screens or views that are not automatically tracked by Measure.

Android

Measure.trackScreenView("Screen Name")

From version 0.12.0 onwards, you can also add attributes to the tracked screen view, which can be useful for providing additional context about the screen.

  • Attribute keys must be strings with a maximum length of 256 characters.
  • Attribute values must be one of the primitive types: int, long, double, float, or boolean.
  • String attribute values can have a maximum length of 256 characters.
Measure.trackScreenView(
    "TrackOrder",
    AttributesBuilder().put("order-id", "12345")
        .build()
)

iOS

Using Swift:

Measure.trackScreenView("Home")

Using ObjC:

[Measure trackScreenView:@"Home"];

Flutter

To hook up with the Flutter navigation system, use the MsrNavigatorObserver which automatically tracks screen views when navigating between screens. You can add it to your MaterialApp or CupertinoApp as follows:

 @override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
  return MaterialApp(
    navigatorObservers: [MsrNavigatorObserver()],
    home: HomeScreen(),
  );
}

To manually track screen views in a Flutter application, you can use the trackScreenView method from the Measure SDK:

Measure.instance.trackScreenView("Home");

[!Note] All Android/iOS lifecycle events are also automatically tracked for Flutter.

Data collected#

Check the following sections for the data collected by Measure for each lifecycle event:

Network Connectivity ChangesCPU Monitoring