Attributes

Attributes are contextual data about the environment your application runs in.

Examples#

If you are building a web or mobile application, examples of attributes can be:

• deviceId
• userId
• country
• browser
• os
• ...etc

Defining attributes#

If we choose to define a new attribute called deviceId, we can create a new file called deviceId.yml in the attributes directory:

description: Device ID
tags:
  - web
type: string

The file name (without the extension) will be the name of the attribute.

Description#

The description property is purely for documentation purposes:

# ...
description: Device ID

Tags#

Tags are used to generate targeted datafiles for your applications:

# ...
tags:
  - web
  - mobile
  - backend

Types#

Based on [JSON Schema], we can chose from several different types for an attribute:

• string
• number (integer or float)
• integer (whole number only)
• boolean
• object
• array

string#

description: My attribute
tags:
  - web
type: string

number#

description: My attribute
tags:
  - web
type: number

integer#

description: My attribute
tags:
  - web
type: integer

boolean#

description: My attribute
tags:
  - web
type: boolean

object#

description: My attribute
tags:
  - web
type: object
properties:
  name:
    type: string
  version:
    type: semver
required:
  - name

array#

description: My attribute
tags:
  - web
type: array
items:
  type: string

Setting attribute values#

In your application, you will be setting the attribute values using provided SDKs.

If we take JavaScript SDK as an example, we can set the attribute values like this:

eventvisor.setAttribute("myAttribute", "value");

If the value is not matching the schema, we will get a validation error in the console.

Deprecating#

You can deprecate an attribute by adding deprecated: true to the attribute definition:

# ...
deprecated: true

If deprecated, it will still continue to work as expected, but the SDKs will show a warning in the console notifying the developers to take action.

Archiving#

You can archive an attribute by adding archived: true to the attribute definition:

# ...
archived: true