Tealeaf Web SDK overview

Web SDK is a JavaScript (JS) library that integrates with a web application to capture data related to visitor interaction, browser environment, and performance. The data is processed and used for a wide range of customer analytics, usability reports, and replaying actual visits.

Web SDK comes with an extensive capability of data capture functionality, but the framework can also be extended to enable capture of a wide variety of custom data.

Some examples of data captured by Web SDK include mouse clicks, keyboard input, scroll, touch interactions, snapshots of the rendered HTML (DOM snapshots), browser type, screen dimensions, cookies, JavaScript exceptions, and page load time.

📘

Note:

For the implementation of the Tealeaf SDK in your web application, see the Integrate the Tealeaf SDK into your web application.

Supported browsers, application types, and protocols for Web SDK

Supported browsers

The Web SDK JavaScript is supported for deployment to the following browsers:

  • IE 11.0 and Microsoft Edge
  • Firefox 30.0 and later
  • Chrome 30 and later
  • iOS 7 Mobile Safari and later

Note about Acoustic Tealeaf CX on-prem

For replay, the Tealeaf RealiTea Viewer uses an embedded instance of the version of Internet Explorer that is installed on the local machine. Replay of Tealeaf sessions in Tealeaf RealiTea Viewer (RTV), the stand-alone application for desktop replay, requires Internet Explorer support. If Internet Explorer is not supported by your enterprise’s IT department, basic replay can be managed through the browser.

Creation of events that monitor JSON-based data that is submitted from Acoustic Tealeaf Web SDK is not supported in Tealeaf RealiTea Viewer. You must use Browser-Based Replay to create events from these versions of Web SDK.

Supported application types

All modern web applications are supported with the following exceptions:

  • Applications based on browser plugins, such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight
  • Java applets
  • Applications that render on HTML Canvas
  • Applications that use Shadow DOM will be captured with the following limitations:
  • Shadow DOM in closed mode will not be captured.
  • Polymer-shimmed apps cannot be captured with Web SDK even if they do not use Shadow DOM.
  • Applications created using Polymer version 1.x or Polymer version 2.x may not be replayable.
  • Applications with deeply nested DOM trees are likely to encounter performance issues.
  • loadWithFrames event will continue to work for frames/iframes in the main document. This event is not supported for frames/iframes within a Shadow DOM tree.

Supported protocols

Tealeaf supports HTTP and HTTPS for request and response communication between client and server. Acoustic Tealeaf does not currently support any other protocols, such as HTTP streaming, HTTP push, or non-HTTP protocols, such as RTMP. Verify that your application does not use non-HTTP/HTTPS protocols.

Impact on your website

The Tealeaf Web SDK is designed to minimize the load on the web server and the web page running in the browser.

The Web SDK JavaScript is minified and designed to be asynchronously loaded and cached by the browser.

Web server optimizations can further improve performance through server-side compression and caching settings.

The amount of data captured by Web SDK and the size of the network requests will depend on the size of the application pages, overall design of the application with respect to DOM mutations and the frequency of data capture configured within the library. It is strongly recommended to conduct application performance tests after integration and before deploying into production.

📘

Included libraries

Starting with Web SDK version 6.4.20, the library will include the following JavaScript libraries inlined to help with required libraries for Tealeaf:

  • pako
  • HammerJS 1.3
  • adds Tealeaf gesture module
  • construct-style-sheets-polyfill 3.1.0 when used on a Safari browser to help with dynamic styles capture
  • adds Tealeaf Ajax listener
  • adds helper to restart Tealeaf for single page application