[ckan-dev] Feedback - "Tracking" feature usage.

Wed Jul 6 01:43:04 UTC 2016

I understand you mean the tracking functionality as described here:
http://docs.ckan.org/en/latest/maintaining/tracking.html

In general, such reporting appears to be very important for some types of
platform owners, especially where it supports CKAN stats views.

However, we've found that CKAN stats puts too much load on the site via
direct DB queries and hope to replace it in a number of portals soon. In
general, we'd like to collect platform data in a format natural to CKAN and
simply reference it as a dataset with a set of routinely updated resources.

We'd then create a resource view extension for such stats/tracking data
that can be used by platform owners to get the information they need for
reporting.

I think that we'd need to have a suitable extension in place before
retiring such tracking from core. Similar to how the related apps code was
retired only after the showcase extension was released. In general, as long
as there are tracking events being triggered in such a way that usage data
can be captured then I think it would be good to have the UX based features
implemented via an extension rather than core.  So, possibly several
extensions - one for generating data via tracked events (config options for
platform owners to determine which events they'd like to capture) - and one
or more for UX enhancements which assume access to tracking data from a
referenced dataset.

I do see that over time platform owners will be looking for more ways to
extend CKAN such that it supports collaboration between data custodians and
data users. Such extension of CKAN would naturally be done via extensions :)

Cheers,
Steven

*STEVEN DE COSTA *|
*EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR*www.linkdigital.com.au

On 6 July 2016 at 03:49, Tyler Kennedy <tk at tkte.ch> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I would like some feedback on if any of you are currently using the
> "tracking" functionality currently in core CKAN, and what in particular you
> are using it for (the search sorting, "hot-or-not" flags, etc...).
>
> The tracking functionality implementation is extremely subpar and in my
> opinion is not of a sufficient quality to reside in the core. Even if
> improved, it's the kind of functionality that would be great if implemented
> as an extension, even if it's an extension that comes bundled-but-disabled
> by default. Removing this from the core will allow us to remove more than
> 1k lines of python and about 300 lines of Javascript + templating, not
> including all of the legacy tests associated with it.
>
> If there is little usage of this module as-is, I will be proposing it's
> deprecation and retirement in CKAN 2.6.
>
> Thank you,
> Tyler Kennedy
>
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