Reduce code complexity by letting an API Gateway handle disparate services and document transformation

Modern Web applications use the microservice architecture for their API service integration. These APIs are often a combination of internal and external systems. When the system is internal, there is better control of the API endpoints and contract payload which the front-end components consume.  When there are external systems, there is no real control as the endpoints and contracts can change with new version updates.

There are also cases when the integration to these external integrations must be done with multiple providers to have some redundancy. Having to integrate with multiple providers, forces the application to manage different endpoints and contracts that have different structure. For these cases, how does the client application know what API endpoint to call? How does it manage the different structure and formats, JSON or XML, on both the request and response contracts? What is the approach when a new external service is introduced? Those are concerning questions that an API Gateway can help manage.

What is an API Gateway?

An API Gateway is an enterprise cloud solution that integrates client applications to back-end services or APIs. It works as a reverse proxy which forwards inbound requests to internal or external services. This approach abstracts the service's endpoint details from the application; therefore, an application only needs to be aware of the gateway endpoint information.  

When dealing with disparate services, an application must deal with the different contracts and formats, JSON, XML, for the request and subsequent response. Having code on the application to manage those contracts, leads to unmanageable and complex transformation code. A gateway provides transformation policies that enables the client application to only send and receive one contract format for each operation. The gateway transformation pipeline processes the request and maps it to the contract schema required by the service. The same takes place with the response, as the payload is also transformed into the schema expected by the client application. This isolates all the transformation process in the gateway and removes that concern from the client.

API Settings

To better understand how an API Gateway can help our apps avoid a direct connection to the services, we should learn about how those services and their operations should be configured.  To help us illustrate this, let’s think of an integration with two disparate providers, as shown on the image below.

The client apps can be using the APIs from either Provider A or B. Both providers are externally located in a different domain, so to manage the endpoint information, the apps are only aware of the gateway base URL.  This means that independently of how many providers we may add to this topology, the clients always connect to the same endpoint.  But wait, this still leaves us with an open question. How is the routing to a specific provider handled?

Operation Routing

Once we have the base URL for the gateway endpoint, we need to specify the routing to the API and specific operation. To set that, we first need to add an API definition to the gateway. The API definition enables us to add an API suffix to the base URL. This suffix is part of the endpoint route information and precedes the operation route information.

An API definition is not complete unless we add the operations or web actions which handle the request/response. An operation defines the resource name, HTTP method and route information that the client application uses to call the API endpoint in the gateway. Each route maps to an operation pipeline which forward requests to the provider’s API endpoint and then sends the response back to the client. In our example, the routing for the operation of Provider A looks as follows:

This image shows us how an API has a prefix as well as operations. Each of the operations is a route entry which completes the operation URL path. This information, plus the base URL, put together handles the routing of a client request to a particular operation pipeline, which runs a series of steps to transform the documents and forward the request to the provider’s operation.

Note: By naming the operations the same within each API, only the API suffix should change. From the application standpoint, this is a configuration update via a push update or a function proxy configuration update.

Operation Pipeline

The operation pipeline is a meta-data driven workflow. It is responsible for managing the mapping of the routing information and execution of the transformation policies for both the request and response. The pipeline has four main steps: Frontend, Inbound, Backend and Outbound.

The Frontend steps handles the Open API specifications JSON document. It defines the hostname, HTTP schemes, and security requirements for the API. It also defines, for each operation, the API route, HTTP method, request parameters or model schema for both the request and response. The models are the JSON contracts that the client application sends and receives.

The Inbound step runs the transformation policies. This includes adding header information, rewrites the URL to change the operation route into the route for the external API. It also handles the transformation of the operation request model into the JSON or XML document for the external API. As an example, this is the step that transform a JSON payload into SOAP by adding the SOAPAction header and SOAP envelope into the request.

The Backend step defines the base URL for the target HTTP endpoint. Each operation route is appended to the backend base URL to send the request to the provider. On this step, security credentials or certificated can be added.

Lastly, the Outbound step, like the Inbound step, handles header and document transformation before the response is sent back to the client application. It transforms the JSON or XML payload into the JSON model defined by the Frontend schema configuration. This also the place to add error handling document standards for the application to handle and log accordingly independently of the provider.

This is an example of a transformation policy which shows an inbound request transformed to SOAP and outbound response transformed to JSON.

Conclusion

In Microservice architecture, a client application can be introduced to disparate APIs which support multiple document structure and different endpoints, as these API services are hosted in different domains. To avoid complex code which deal with multiple document formats and endpoints, an API Gateway can be used instead. This enables us to use meta-data driven pipelines to manage that complexity away from the app. This should enable the development teams to focus on app design and functional programming instead of writing code to manage infrastructure concerns.

Have you faced this challenge before, and if so, what did you do to resolve it? If you use code in your app, what did you learn from that experience?

Send question or comment at Twitter @ozkary

Originally published by ozkary.com

Static Web Apps SPA Handle 404 Page Not Found

Single Page Applications (SPA) handle the client-side routing or navigation of pages without the need to send a post back or request to the server hosting the application. To enable the client-side routing, applications build using React or Angular and others bundle the application for a single download of all the page resources. This bundle download allows the routing service to load the next view container and components when the user selects a new page, essentially loading a new route, without having to make a request. Depending on the size of the application, this approach can lead to initial slow load time on the browser.

To address the initial slow load time, a build optimization can be done that can enable the loading of the content associated with a route to be done on demand, which requires a request be sent to the server. The optimization is handled by using a lazy loading approach, in which the route content is downloaded as an application chunk from the hosting environment. This means that instead of downloading the entire app during the initial download, only an index of URLs pointing to chunk files that are associated to the route is downloaded. This can also include chunk files for CSS, JS and even image downloads. As a route is loaded, the index lookup provides the URL of the chunk to download, thus making the app load faster. When another route is loaded, a new chunk is downloaded.

Client-Side vs Server-Side Routing

The client-side routing works as designed when the navigation operations are done normally by the user clicking on menu options or call-to-action buttons.  In some cases, a user may have to reload or refresh the web application. This action forces the browser to make a request to the server.  Once the request makes to the server, the server-side routing rules are applied. If the server routes definitions do not have a handler for all the routes defined on the client-side, the server fails to find the content that is requested and responds with an HTTP 404 error, which means that a page is not found.

By default, the server-side routing knows to always return the index page hosting the SPA.  This is usually mapped to the root of the domain or / path. However, when a user starts to navigate the app, the routes change to match a different path. For the server to be able to understand what to send back when this new path is loaded, we need to configure the server in a way that it knows to return the index page for all the routes, not just the root path. For Static Web Apps (SWA) which are hosted on CDN resources, this is done using a configuration setting for the application. These settings enable the configuration of the routing and security policy for the application. Let’s use an example to review that in more detail.

Static Web Apps Settings

Imagine that we have an SPA app with the following client-site route configuration:

The above routing information is typical of an app that has a home, about and contact page. The SPA provides the navigation elements or call-to-action buttons, so the user can select any of those pages.  When the user is on the home page which is defined by the home route or /, a page reload does not cause any problem as this path is usually associated to the index page of the application on the server routing configuration.

When the user navigates to the other route locations, for example /about, a page reloads sends a post back to the server, and if there is no handling for that page the 404 error is created. Depending on the hosting resource, the 404 page can be system generated, which takes the user away from the application experience altogether.

To manage this concern, the latest release of SWA provides the staticwepapps.config.json file. This file is required to be able to configure the server-side route and security information for the app. It is also used to override the behavior of some HTTP operations, as well as configuring HTTP responses. For the scope of this conversation, we focus on the routing configuration only.

Note: At the time of this writing, the routes.json file has been deprecated for the staticwebapps.config.json. The configuration between these files has some differences, so carefully review the options being used, just renaming routes.json will lead to problems on the application behavior.

Routing and Response Overrides

The routes' configuration enables us to add server-side routing rules with security, for authentication and authorization requirements, as well redirect rules for a request.  To avoid the 404 error, the SWA configuration should have an entry for every client-side route configuration. For our specific example, this means that we should add the routes for the /about and /contact-us route. This is done by adding route entries in the routes' collection, as shown below:

"routes": [     {       "route": "/",       "allowedRoles": ["anonymous"]     }, {       "route": "/about",       "allowedRoles": ["anonymous"]     },  {       "route": "/contact-us",       "allowedRoles": ["anonymous"]     } ],

The routes on the server-side configuration lists all the client-side configuration and add a security role to enable anonymous users to access the route.  

Do We Need to Map All the Routes?

We do not only if we use a fallback policy. Our routing configuration only has three separate routes, and thus it is simple to manage. This however is not reflective of a complex app which can have several route entries. In addition, having to add every single client-side entry on the server is error-prone, as a route can be configured improperly or just forgotten to be included.

The Static Web App team also figure as much, so a fallback setting was introduced on more recent releases. This setting allows the server configuration to “fallback” to the default route when a route is not defined. This works just as good because for SPA, we always want the index page to be sent to the client. As the page is loaded on the browsers, the SPA routing service identifies the route information and download the chunk files associated to the route. This fallback setting looks as follows:

"navigationFallback": {     "rewrite": "index.html",     "exclude": ["/images/*.{png,jpg,gif}", "/css/*"]   },

 

On the fallback setting, we should note that we are doing a rewrite operation instead of redirect. This is efficient because a rewrite is handled on the server, so there is no client-side trip and another request as the redirect operation creates.  We should also notice that we do not want to rewrite missing resources to the index page. To avoid this, we exclude all the images and CSS files. The order on how these settings is configured on the file is also relevant. Usually, the settings that come later on the document take precedence and override the previous settings. To help on this, we can look at a complete staticwepapps.config.json.

Are There Client-Side Page Not Found Errors?

Yes, there are these errors as well. These errors are different from an HTTP 404 error. These client-side errors indicate that there is some call-to-action element on the app that has a path with no routing configuration. This is not a server error, so there should also be a fallback to handle that problem on the client routing configuration. This is often done by creating a wildcard route entry as the last route step, so when a route is not found, it can load the page not found component.

Conclusion

SPA application routing is done on the client-side of the application, but when the user does an operation that can cause the SPA to bootstrap again, a server-side request is made. If the hosting environment web server, CDN do not have routing configuration or a fallback to handle new routes added to the client side, the hosting environment returns a 404-error page that takes the user completely out of the application. Therefore, it is important to add routing to both the client and server and manage route issues on both ends. This should help us guards against 404 page not found errors.

Have you experienced similar problems with your apps? 

Send question or comment at Twitter @ozkary

Originally published by ozkary.com

Web Development with Nodejs NPM NVM

When building web applications using JavaScript frameworks like React or Angular, there are tools that enable the installation of these frameworks and aid in the development process. These tools are essential to be able to build, test and manage some dependencies in our projects. It is those package dependencies that we continuously need to keep up with the latest update. To update those packages, we use the NPM CLI tool, which runs on the NodeJS runtime environment.

When we need to update a package, we may face issues that a package or a new version of that package is not supported (see error below) for the current version of Node.js and that we need to update to a new version. In this article, we discuss the tools that are used to manage the software development process and how to best update NodeJS using the command line interface (CLI).

npm WARN notsup Unsupported engine for create-react-app@5.0.0: wanted: {"node":">=14"} (current: {"node":"12.16.1","npm":"6.14.4"}) npm WARN notsup Not compatible with your version of node/npm: create-react-app@5.0.0

This error message indicates that a particular required version of Node.js is not in the system and node version 14 is a dependency.

What is Node.js?

Node.js is a cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment. It is used by software engineers to build server-side and client-side web applications.  When building client applications with popular frame works like React, Angular and others, Node.JS provides the runtime environment for the JavaScript applications to run. It also enables the build and test tools that are used during the implementation effort of those applications.

JavaScript's applications are made of several libraries or packages that can be added to the project. Those libraries are mostly refereed as packages, and to install them, developers use a CLI tool to install and configure them.

What is NPM?

Node Package Manager (NPM) is a tool that runs on the NodeJS runtime environment. It comes with the installation of Node.js. Its purpose is to download and install packages for a particular project. Those packages and respective versions are tracked on a JSON file on the root folder of the project. With NPM, we can also install other CLI tools that can be specific for scaffolding startup codebase for a particular JavaScript framework. Some examples include, but not limited to, are: yeoman, create-react-app, angular CLI.

NPM has many commands, but the install command is the most basic and most important one, as this is the one that enables us to install and update packages. Let’s look at some of these commands:

Command	Description
$ npm install package-name  –save	Installs a package latest version and saves the reference the package.json file
$ npm install package-name	Installs a package but does not store any reference information
$ npm update package-name	Updates a package with a new release. NPM decides what version to select
$ npm install package-name@latest	To have better control on what version to install, we can provide the version number or latest release flag right after the package name, separated by the @ character
$ npm install -h	Shows help information on running the install command
$ npm run script-name	Runs a script command defined on the package.json for build, test, starting the project
$ npm install -g npm@next	This command is used to install the next version of NPM. The -g flag should be used to install this globally in the system

 

What is package JSON?

Package.json is a metadata file which host all the project related information like project name, licensing, authors, hosting, location and most importantly information to track project dependencies and scripts to run.

When installing NPM packages to a project, the information is saved on a file at the root of the project, package.json. This file maintains project information and all the package dependencies.  By tracking the package dependencies, a development environment can be easily created it. The developers only need to clone the repo or codebase and use NPM to download all the dependencies by typing the following command from the root folder of the project:

$ npm install

 

*Note:  package.json must exist in the same folder location where this command is typed

The script area of the package.json file provide commands that can be used to create production quality builds, test plan execution, coding standard validation and running the application. These are essential command for the day-to-day development operations and integration with CICD tools like GitHub Actions or Jenkins.

Keep Node.js Updated

With a better understanding of Node.js and the purpose of NPM for the development process, we can now discuss how to deal with situations when NPM fails to install a package because our Node.js installation is behind a few versions, and we need to upgrade it.

What is NVM?

The best way to update Node.js is by using another CLI tool, Node Version Manager (NVM). This tool enables us to manage multiple versions of Node.js in our development workspace. It is not a required tool, but it is useful because it enables us to upgrade and test the application to the latest releases, which can help us identify compatibility issues with the new runtime or NPM packages. It also enables us to downgrade to previous version to help us verify when a feature started to break.

To install NVM on Linux, we can run the following command:

$ curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.34.0/install.sh | bash

Once the tool is installed, we can run a few commands to check the current Node.js version, install a new one and switch between versions. Let us review those commands:

Command	Description
$ nvm version	Shows the selected node version
$ nvm –version	Shows the nvm cli version
$ nvm ls	Lists all the Node.js versions installed
$ nvm use version-number	Selects a Node.js version to use
$ nvm install version-number	Installs a Node.js version

 

To install a new version of Node.js, we can use the install command. This downloads and install a new version. After the version is installed, the environment should default to the new version of Node. If the environment was encountering the unsupported Node.js version error, we can run the NPM command that failed again, and since the new version is installed, it should be able to install the new package.

Conclusion

When working with JavaScript frameworks like React or Angular, the Node.js runtime environment must be installed and kept with the latest version.  When new NPM packages need to be installed on our projects, we need to make sure that they are compatible with the current version of the runtime environment, Node.js. If this is not the case, the NPM package fails to install, and we need to update the runtime with the next or latest version. Using tools like NPM and NVM, we can manage the different versions of packages and runtime respectively.  Understanding the purpose of these tools and how to use them is part of the web development process, and it should help us keep the development environment up to date.

Have you used these CLI tools before? Do you like to use visual tools instead?

Send question or comment at Twitter @ozkary

Originally published by ozkary.com

App Branding Strategy with GitHub Branches and Actions

Branding applications is a common design requirement. The concept is simple. We have an application with functional core components, but based on the partner or client, we need to change the theme or look of the design elements to match that of the client’s brand. Some of these design elements may include images, content, fonts, and theme changes. There are different strategies to support an app branding process, either in the build process or at runtime. In this article, we discuss how we can support a branding strategy using a code repository branching strategy and GitHub build actions.

Branching Strategy

A code repository enables us to store the source code for software solutions. Different branches are mostly used for feature development and production management purposes. In the case of branding applications, we want to be able to use branches for two purposes. The first is to be able to import the assets that are specific to the target brand. The second is to associate the branch to build actions which are used to build and deploy the branded application.

To help us visualize how this process works, let’s work on a typical branding use case. Think of an app for which there is a requirement to support two different brands, call them brand-a and brand-b. With this in mind, we should think about the design elements that need to be branded. For our simple case, those elements include the app title, logo, text, or messaging in JSON files, fonts, and the color theme or skin.

We now need to think of the build and deployment requirements for these two brands. We understand that each brand must be deployed to a different hosting resource with different URLs, let’s say those sites are hosted at brand-a.ozkary.com and brand-b.ozkary.com, These could be Static Web App or CDN hosting resources.

With the understanding that the application needs to be branded with different assets and must be built and deployed to different hosting sites, we can conclude that a solution will be to create different branches which can help us implement the design changes to the app and at the same time, enable us to deploy them correctly by associating a GitHub build action to each branch.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.  It is essentially a workflow that executes commands from a YML file to run actions like unit test, NPM build or any other commands that can be executed on the CLI to build the application.

A GitHub Action or workflow is triggered when there is a pull request (PR) on a branch. This is basically a code merge into the target branch. The workflow executes all the actions that are defined by the script. The typical build actions would be to pull the current code, move the files to a staging environment, run the build and unit test commands, and finally push the built assets into the target hosting location.

A GitHub Action is the great automation tool to meet the branding requirements because it enables us to customize the build with the corresponding brand assets prior to building the application. There is however some additional planning, so before we can work on the build, we need to define the implementation strategy to support a branding configuration.

Implementation Strategy

When coding a Web application with JavaScript frameworks, a common pattern is to import components and design elements into the container or pages of the application from their folder/path location. This works by either dynamically loading those files at runtime or loading them a design/build time.

The problem with loading dynamic content at runtime is that this requires that all the different brand assets be included in the build. This often leads to a big and slow build process as all those files need to be included. The design time approach is more effective as the build process would only include those specific features into the build, making the build process smaller and faster.

Using the design time approach does require a strategy. Even though, we could make specific file changes on the branch, to add the brand-a files as an example, and commit them, this is a manual process that is error prompt. We instead need an approach that is managed by the build process. For this process to work, we need to think of a folder structure within our project to better support it. Let’s review an approach.

After reviewing the image of the folder structure, we should notice that the component files import the resources from the same specific folder location, content. This off course is not enough to support branding, but by looking carefully, we should see that we have brand resources outside the src folder of the project in the brands' folder. There are also additional folders for each brand with the necessary assets.

This way this works is that only the files within the src and public folders are used for the build process. Files outside the src folder should not be included in the build, but they are still within source control.  The plan is to be able to copy the brand files into the src/content folder before the build action takes place. This is where we leverage a custom action on the GitHub workflow.

Custom Action

GitHub Actions enable us to run commands or actions during the build process. These actions are defined as a step within the build job, so a step to meet the branding requirements can be inserted into the job, which can handle copying the corresponding files to the content folders. Let’s look at a default workflow file that is associated to a branch, so we can see clearly how it works.

By default, the workflow has two steps, it first checks out or pull all the files from the code repo. It then executes the build commands that are defined in the package.json file. This is the steps that generates the build output, which is deployed to the hosting location. The logical step here is to insert a step or multiple steps to copy the files from all the brand subfolders. After making this suggested change, the workflow file should look as follows:

The new steps just copy files from the target brand folder into the src and public folders.  This should enable the build process to find those brand specific files and build the application with the new logo, fonts, and theme. The step to copy the fonts does some extra work. The reason is that the font files have different font family names, so we want to be able to find all the files and delete them first. We can then move forward and copy the new files.

It is important to notice that the SASS files, SCSS extension, are key players on this process. Those are the files that provide variable and font information to support the new color theme, styles, and fonts. When using SASS, the rest of the components only import those files and use the variables for their corresponding styles. This approach minimizes the number of files that need to be customized. The _font.scss file, for example, handles the font file names for the different brands, as those files are named differently.

 For cases where SASS is not used, it is OK to instead copy over the main CSS files that defines the color theme and style for the app, but the point should be to minimize the changes by centralizing the customization just by defining variables instead of changing all the style files as this can become hard to manage.

Conclusion

Branding applications is a common design requirement which can become difficult to manage without the right approach. By using a branching strategy and GitHub custom action, we can manage this requirement and prevent build problems by distributing the branded assets in different directory to keep the build process small. This approach also helps  eliminate the need to have developers make code commits just to make import reference changes.

Thanks for reading.

Gist Files

Default Action File

Branch-A Action File

Originally published by ozkary.com

Understand Your Users with App Insights to Improve Adoption

After spending several months of software requirements, scrum and design meetings, hours of implementation and testing efforts, our application is finally deployed, but the work for a sustainable product is not complete. After the app is deployed, it is important to understand the users to improve its adoption, and to understand its users, many questions need to be answered. Some common questions may include:

How do we know about user acceptance? How can we measure the user experience? Are all those different features on the app being used? How can we learn from our users to make app improvements?

To answer those question, we need to collect data that can be used to provide and validate the answers.  The best approach to collect this data is by adding telemetry tracking in our apps. By tracking user activities like page views, clicks and custom events, we can use Application Insights analytical visualization tools to understand the user’s behavior. In this article, we look at some of the analytical tools that are available on Azure Monitor Services, which we can leverage to help us answer the questions listed before and better understand our users. Before we get to understand those tools, let’s first provide an overview of the monitor service that host them.

Application Insights (AppInsights)

AppInsights is part of the Cloud Monitor Services on Azure. It has two main areas that work tightly together. It is a monitor service with statistical analysis tooling, and it is an application framework, with support for languages like JavaScript, C#, Python, that is used to instrument our applications and track telemetry information for our apps.

This service has multiple statistical analysis tool to help digest the telemetry information for many areas of the apps which can include front-end, back-end, APIs. The tools are also grouped on areas of concerns like investigation for performance metrics and problems, monitoring/alert, and application usage.

It is the usage statistical analysis tooling that can help us learn how are users interacting with the application. Some of these tools include the users, sessions, events, cohorts, funnels, and flows tools. Let’s review each one of these tools and see how they can help us understand our users and their behavior.

Users Analysis

The user analysis tool helps us understand details about the users. We can visualize what events and pages/views the users are interested in as well as some user specifics like country or city of origin, operating system in their devices, and browser versions.

Those details can help us make decisions like improving advertisement on some geographical areas to attract those users. Also, they are great indicators to understand the usability based on the device types and browsers being used. This leads to making decision on open issues that are related to mobile device improvement, as an example.

Sessions Analysis

The session analysis tool is very similar to the users’ tool, but it provides session-based information about those users. Keep in mind that one user can have multiple session. These sessions can help us see how users are using the application. The sessions can be visualized by tracking page views and user events. This information is valuable to be able to understand what areas of the application are mostly used. Analysis can be done to understand usability problems in some areas, so they can be improved or simply removed from the app altogether.  

The session information is very valuable for some A/B testing analysis, in which design variants can be introduced to the user experience. This, for example, can reveal that users tend to have a much better user experience with one design over the other.

Events

When we need to understand how users are responding to a particular design or feature on the application, we can use the events tool to see the telemetry information that is collected when the user makes some actions like clicking on tabs, links, dropdowns to change selections. The collected insights from these actions can reveal if a particular feature is relevant to users. This can help determine that perhaps a feature is not needed at all or if a design is too confusing to our users.

Custom events not only track user actions, but they can also be used to track some data and or integration telemetry. For example, we can track events about data variations that comes from an external API. The application may not have any control about the source of the data, but custom events can help us track those variations, which leads into creating some countermeasures to handle them.

Other areas that can be tracked with custom events can include input validation, timeouts from user inactivity, chat or help request from specific areas of the application. All these leads to better insights for the improvement of the overall user experience.

Cohorts

Cohorts enable us to create a specific group of users which have completed a specific goal metric like signing for newsletters, completed a purchase or landed on a particular area of the app. By predefining groups of users with a particular criterion, we can use that group as a filter on the users, sessions, and events tools. This enables us to continuously analyze the same criteria and compare performance metrics.

The advantage of using Cohorts is that we can use custom logs query expressions to select the information we need from the customEvents and pageViews log tables. The customEvents table has all the events that are sent from the app, while the pageViews table contains all the page visit information. Combining these tables with a particular criterion can generate an excellent filter which can enable us to analyze the data in more detail.

Funnels

Most apps have a particular workflow that we would ideally like our users to follow. This however may not always be the case, and users may not follow the steps as expected. Therefore, we require a tool that can help us analyze the data to verify how are the users running each step of the workflow. Funnels represent a set of steps on the application and the percentage of users who follow such steps.

For example, an app workflow may consist of several pages/steps to allow the user to register. Since each page visit is tracked, we can create a funnel and select each page visit as a separate step, thus creating a workflow. The output should indicate to us which step the users are not completing or when they stop or abandon the workflow. This is an indication that a particular step may have some design issues that are causing our users to drop off and not complete the workflow. This information should help identify design improvements on those pages to help guide the user and improve the completion percentage.

User Navigation

Whereas Funnels can help us understand the percentage of users completing certain application steps, it does not provide to us enough information to clearly see where the remaining percentage of users are going.

User Navigation visualization tool provides this insight. The tool provides a page view visualization that can help us track how users are navigating the site. Ideally, the workflow should be a sequential flow, but if we see that users are flowing/going into other areas of the app or stopping at a particular step, we can analyze that information further and make some design changes that can help increase the completion percentage.

To use the tool, an initial event like a page visit can be selected as the starting point, then custom events and other page views can be included to see a flow diagram of the steps before and after the selected target event.

When it comes to user visiting pages, this is by far the most useful tool for us to examine, as this can lead us into better understanding of our application and make design decisions on how to improve the user experience and app navigation which help improve the page visit goals for our apps.

Conclusion

When an application development life cycle starts, several decisions are made based on the information that is available during the design phase of the app. It is very important to validate those design decisions by instrumenting our application, so the necessary telemetry information can be gathered and analyzed post deployment. It is then that we can better understand the app users to help validate the design decisions or make changes to improve both the user experience and adoption of our apps. In addition, this is an ongoing process as user behavior can change over time, so ongoing iteration of this process is required.

Add AppInsights to Single Page Apps

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Originally published by ozkary.com