What is a good way to track an event property that applies to nearly every single event, but is not semantically a ‘user’ property?
Imagine an application like Google Docs, where you’re creating text documents online. You might have events like ‘Inserted Image’, ‘Applied Heading’, ‘Performed Undo’, ‘Inserted List’, ‘Corrected Typo’, ‘Added Comment' and some 50-100 more. And for every one of them, you’d like to record document id (the long string in the url https://docs.google.com/document/d/<documentId>/edit). You probably also want to record things like user’s access level to the given document (owner/editor/commenter/reader) and whatnot.
In this scenario, should documentId/documentAccessLevel/etc be event properties or a user properties? On one hand, it seems far easier to declare those as user properties and set them once each time user opens a document.
ampli.identify(currentUserId, {
documentId: 123,
documentAccessLevel: 'OWNER',
});
As opposed to computing and adding those properties manually for every one of your 100 events.
On the other hand, it’s odd to describe documentId as a user property, since there’s nothing user-related about it. And I’m wondering if there are unexpected downsides to doing this, as it feels a little hacky.
Best answer by Saish Redkar
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