/angular-activity-monitor

An Angular 1.x service that tracks users' DOM activity

Primary LanguageJavaScriptMIT LicenseMIT

Angular Activity Monitor

This is a simple service that will emit a couple of events based on the users' DOM activity. It also allows you to "keep items alive" in the background so long as the user is considered "active".

Installation:

$ [npm|bower] install --save angular-activity-monitor

Usage:

// with bower (or without packaging)
angular.module('myModule', ['ActivityMonitor']);

// with npm (via webpack or Browserify)
angular.module('myModule', [require('angular-activity-monitor')]);

MyController.$inject = ['ActivityMonitor'];
function MyController(ActivityMonitor) {
  ActivityMonitor.on('inactive', function() {
    alert("y0, you're inactive!");
  });
}
ActivityMonitor.options (configuration):
  • enabled: whether to regularly check for inactivity (default: false) [bool]
  • keepAlive: background execution frequency (default: 800) [seconds]
  • inactive: how long until user is considered inactive (default: 900) [seconds]
  • warning: when user is nearing inactive state (deducted from inactive) (default: 60) [seconds]
  • disableOnInactive: Once user is inactive, all event listeners are detached and activity monitoring is discontinued (default: true) [bool]
  • DOMevents: array of events on the DOM that count as user activity (default: ['mousemove', 'mousedown', 'mouseup', 'keypress', 'wheel', 'touchstart', 'scroll'])
ActivityMonitor.user (information about the user):
  • action: timestamp of the users' last action (default: Date.now()) [milliseconds]
  • active: is the user considered active? (default: true) [bool]
  • warning: is the user nearing inactivity? (default: false) [bool]
ActivityMonitor Methods:
  • on(event, callback) (alias bind): subsribe to a particular event
  • off(event[, callback]) (alias unbind): unsubscribe to a particular event. If no callback or namespace provided, all subscribers for the given event will be cleared.
  • activity(): manually invoke user activity (this updates the User object above)
ActivityMonitor Events:
  • keepAlive: anything to execute (at the Options.keepAlive interval) so long as the user is active.
  • warning: when user is approaching inactive state
  • inactive: when user is officially considered inactive

How long until user is inactive?

This can be configured by setting the ActivityMonitor.options.inactive property to the desired timeout (in seconds).

When is the user considered active?

Everytime one of the follow DOM events occur, the action and active properties on the User object is updated accordingly.

var DOMevents = ['mousemove', 'mousedown', 'keypress', 'wheel', 'touchstart', 'scroll'];

(Un)subscribing and Event namespacing

If you've ever used jQuery.unbind(), you're in luck. This subscription model works almost exactly like that. Subscribing is pretty straight forward using .on() or .bind() as described above but, unsubscribing gets a little weird. You essentially have two options:

  • Pass the same callback argument to .unbind() or .off()
  • Subscribe and unsubscribe using event namespacing.

same callback example

var foo = function() {
  alert("y0, you're inactive!");
};
ActivityMonitor.on('inactive', foo); /* subscribe */
ActivityMonitor.off('inactive', foo); /* unsubscribe */

event namespace example

Instead of maintaining references to callbacks in order to unbind them, we can namespace the events and use this capability to easily unbind our actions. Namespaces are defined by using a period (.) character when binding to an event:

ActivityMonitor.on('inactive.myEvent', function foo() {
  alert("y0, you're inactive!");
});
ActivityMonitor.off('inactive.myEvent');

If there's something missing or some quirk you've found. FIX OR UPDATE ME!!!