VS Code Telemetry

A helper package for VS Code developers to send telemetry events from the extension host and any webview.

While @vscode/extension-telemetry is recommended to be used for sending telemetry events within VS Code extensions (for VS Code v1.70.0 and upwards), it requires some configuration to allow sending them across extension host and webviews. This package uses @vscode/extension-telemetry under the hood and helps to overcome that issue.

Install

With NPM:

npm install --save-dev vscode-telemetry

With Yarn

yarn add --dev vscode-telemetry

Usage

The interface of the telemetry reporter is identical to @vscode/extension-telemetry as it is being used under the hood. Setup and usage differ a bit though.

Setup

In order to register the reporter you need to call the configure method and pass in the extension context as well as the instrumentation key that you can receive from your Azure project.

import vscode from "vscode";
import { TelemetryReporter } from 'vscode-telemetry';

export async function activate(context: vscode.ExtensionContext) {
    TelemetryReporter.configure(process.env.INSTRUMENTATION_KEY!);
    // ...
}

export deactivate () {
    // ...
}

Setup Webviews

Webviews in VS Code can be registered using the WebviewViewProvider or calling vscode.window.createWebviewPanel(...). For both methods there are slight adjustment necessary to connect the reporter between both environments.

If you use a WebviewViewProvider rather than calling resolveWebviewView you have to call resolveWebviewTelemetryView, e.g.:

import { TelemetryViewProvider } from 'vscode-telemetry';
import type { WebviewView, WebviewViewProvider } from 'vscode';

export default class TodoAppPanel extends TelemetryViewProvider implements WebviewViewProvider {
    async resolveWebviewTelemetryView(webviewView: WebviewView): Promise<void> {
        webviewView.webview.html = await getHtmlForWebview(webviewView.webview, this._context);
        // ...
    }
}

If you create a webview via vscode.window.createWebviewPanel(...) just import the replacement method from this package, e.g.:

import { createWebviewTelemetryPanel } from 'vscode-telemetry';

const panel = createWebviewTelemetryPanel(...)

Usage in Extension Host

Now everywhere within your VS Code extension you can send events by importing TelemetryReporter and call its methods, e.g.:

import { TelemetryReporter } from 'vscode-telemetry';

export class SomeController {
    private someMethod () {
        TelemetryReporter.sendTelemetryEvent('eventName', { some: 'property' })
        // ...
    }
}

Usage in WebView

When using the reporter in the webview, just import it from the vscode-telemetry/webview package and confgure it as follows:

import { TelemetryReporter } from 'vscode-telemetry/webview';

const vscode = acquireVsCodeApi()
const reporter = TelemetryReporter.configure(vscode)

reporter.sendTelemetryEvent('Hello World')

Contribute

You have an idea on how to improve the package, please send us a pull request! Have a look into our contributing guidelines.

Getting Help

Running into issues or are you missing a specific usecase? Feel free to file an issue or join our Discord.

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Copyright 2022 © Stateful – Apache 2.0 License