1052731 - Move telemetry start/end session calls to onResume/onPause instead of onStart/onStop

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Search Activity, defect)

Description

[:Margaret Leibovic]

We're finding that regular fennec load url calls are ending up as part of the search activity session. We should end this session earlier. As part of this, we should also start the session later.

See the patch in bug 1042956 for where we need to change this.

Comment 1

[Eric Edens [:eedens]]

This seems good. One potential issue is telemetry in the settings activity (SearchPreferenceActivity). When the preferences activity is launched, the main activity will get paused and end the current session.

Should prefs have its own session?

Comment 2

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Bear in mind that moving to onResume/onPause strictly alters the definition of a session.

For example, activities are paused during intent processing, not stopped. onResume/onPause is never nested, whereas start/stop are.

Comment 3

[Harsha]

I would like to build on this bug. Need more Info I'm new here.

Comment 4

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Harsha from comment #3)
> I would like to build on this bug. Need more Info I'm new here.

Hi Harsha! Thanks for your interest. First of all, do you have a build of Fennec set up? If not, you'll want to follow the directions here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fennec/Android

However, we develop the search activity feature in a separate github repo from mozilla-central, then use that to generate patches for mozilla-central, so you'll want to clone this repo and make changes there:
https://github.com/mozilla/fennec-search

This post to mobile-firefox-dev has some more details about our workflow for generating a patch/pull request:
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/mobile-firefox-dev/2014-August/000844.html

You can look in bug 1055315 to see where these probes were originally landed.

Feel free to ask questions in #mobile on irc.mozilla.org. There are usually people in there who can help with any build problems.

Given the previous discussion in this bug, we may need to have some more discussion to figure out what the correct approach is to fix this bug. If we do move the session start/stop to onResume/onPause, we will need to do something to make sure there's a session around the settings activity as well.

Comment 5

[gokul.uf]

hey margaret, is this bug still unassigned?
if yes, I would like to take it up :)

Comment 6

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to gokul.uf from comment #5)
> hey margaret, is this bug still unassigned?
> if yes, I would like to take it up :)

I'm sorry for the slow response! Thinking about this bug more, and seeing some of the telemetry data we've been gathering, I'm not sure if we should go forward with this, since I'm worried it might give us even more incorrect sessions.

onStart/onStop aren't perfect, but I think it's probably better to err on the side of some extra events ending up in the search session, rather than missing events, especially since the extra events ending up in the search session are obviously not a part of the search session.