How to respect queued function calls to snippet global when initializing via npm

[bgiori]

I am a developer for a script which needs to integrate with segment to track events.

Our script, installed in the page head, regularly loads before segment, even when segment is installed in the main app bundle via npm.

Our script relies on queueing the ready function to the snippet window.analytics array in order to know when the segment analytics sdk is ready to provide user identity (anonymous id, user id, traits) and track events. If the segment sdk is installed via npm (no snippet/function queue) then functions queued to the global are not called by default.

I understand we can't always rely on the global being set and named analytics, but it'd be useful to be able to initialize the npm installed instance with an option to read a function queue from a global.

Happy to answer any questions if something is not clear.

TL;DR I'd like to request the ability to configure a global function queue to read from when initializing the SDK installed via npm.

[silesky]

Ah, so after writing some thoughts, I think I understand -- you want a universal way to enqueue events based on global variable, regardless of how Segment is installed. (If you still needed to instruct users to initialize npm with a given analytics key, that sort of waters down the mission, not sure...)

This hasn’t come up to my knowledge, as we don’t have a lot of people wrapping our library in this way beyond plugins.

At this point, only rec I have is your script just exposes a global that contains something that is explicitly registered as a Segment utility plugin: e.g. https://segment.com/docs/connections/sources/catalog/libraries/website/javascript/#example-plugins

Some instructions for users:

import { myPlugin } from '@mycompany/segment-analytics-thing'

analytics.register(myPlugin)
analytics.load(....)

<!-- and, for snippet users, you could have a script that does -->
<script src="cdn.company.com/segment-analytics-thing.global.js"></script>
<script>
window.analytics // segment boilerPlate here
...

// modification
analytics.register(myPlugin)

analytics.load(....)
</script>

We don't support anything like this atm -- we have written libraries like consent that require you to explicitly wrap the analytics instance or register a plugin, but nothing that can be installed in the global scope that just works for any analytics instance. One consideration is doing this in a way that supports multiple analytics instances on the same page --- which is the reason we don't read from the window.analytics queue for the npm versions.

The line of code in question is:
https://github.com/segmentio/analytics-next/blob/master/packages/browser/src/core/buffer/index.ts#L252

This is an interesting question, but I don't think I have a ready workaround!

[bgiori]

Thanks @silesky that makes sense. I think a exposing a plugin should be sufficient for our use case!