Support for append() and union() people methods

[sebaferreras]

Hello,

First of all, thanks for creating and maintaining such a great Cordova plugin!

Based on this guide (from Mixpanel docs) there're two methods that allows us to add elements to a property that is a list: union() and append() but I couldn't find those methods in this plugin.

Use mixpanel.people.union() [...], which will merge a value to a list or create that value if necessary, so what you end up with is a list that you can continue to build on [...]. Using a mixpanel.people.set call to set these sites as properties on Aaron’s people profile would cause previous sites to get overwritten each time Aaron worked at a new site, which is not the desired behavior.

// Objective-C (iOS)
// jane works at McDonalds
[mixpanel identify:@"jane"];

[mixpanel.people.union:@{
    @"organizations": @["McDonalds"],
    @"$name": @"jane"
}];

// Java (Android) 
// jane works at McDonalds
mixpanel.getPeople().identify("jane");
mixpanel.getPeople().union({
    "organizations": ["McDonalds"],
    "$name": "jane"
});

Are they currently being supported by this plugin?

[samzilverberg]

hi @sebaferreras , i didn't implement union and append but after taking a short look in the android/ios related code they should be very simple to add (pretty much copy-paste all around with some light renaming:) ).
i'll try and add this this week, unless you wanna try it out yourself and open a PR.
let me know.

[sebaferreras]

If you don't mind, please go ahead and add them when you have some time... I'll take a look at your implementation in order to learn for the next time (I know nothing about native iOS development).

Thanks again for your support :)

[samzilverberg]

FYI i know very little about ios dev myself :)
I pretty much copy, paste, adapt, build try it out on ios simulator and fix whatevers not working 🤣

[samzilverberg]

union and append added in 4.5.0
they both accept an object with key names and array values to union/append, example:

mixpanel.people.union({
  "organizations": ["McDonalds"],
  "$name": ["jane"]
})

NOTICE that passing in "$name": "jane" as per your comment will throw an error because "jane" is not inside an array.

[sebaferreras]

Looks great, thanks @samzilverberg 👏

[jpike88]

@samzilverberg why is this code deviating from the mixpanel-js api? I am able to construct union objects with strings as values without having to place them in arrays on the web version of mixpanel.

[jpike88]

On further thought, it just seems to make no sense. $firstName should be a string, why would you want to place that value in an array anyway?