feat: modify segment event to remove message content

[varshamenon4]

COSMO-547

Modify segment event to remove message contents and PII.

[varshamenon4]

A quick question.

[varshamenon4]

Pretty straightforward and easy change, but I'm not sure how to test Segment locally? Is this possible? Do I need to merge/deploy to stage and test there?

[MichaelRoytman]

I think there are two things to test.

• That we no longer call sendTrackEvent with the content key in the event.
  • I think that this can be accomplished in testing or local development.
• That the content key in the event does not appear in Segment events.
  • I think that this can be accomplished in stage or production.

Testing
One thing I think we should consider is adding a test suite thunks.test.js to test this thunk. As part of that test, we could mock out the sendTrackEvent function and verify that it's not called with content. I don't think you'd need to test the entire thunk, since it predates this change. That's one way to verify that your change worked at a unit test level. Here is an existing example.

In terms of testing this additionally, I think we have some options, and it depends on what you want to test.

Local Development
This would be another form of asserting 1 above.

By default, when you call initialize in the Learning MFE to initialize the app, it'll set up the SegmentAnalyticsService here.

I'm actually not sure how that class functions locally, but I would expect that the call to sendTrackEvent will return early here when running the Learning MFE locally, so the execution of sendTrackEvent wouldn't even get far enough to validate the contents of the event. But it may be worth throwing a breakpoint in to see if it does get to sendTrackEvent.

If not, we could consider overriding the analytics service via the Javascript configuration using the analyticsService key. The Javascript configuration file can be defined locally; see frontend-plugin-advertisements for an example. Here is an example of us overriding the logging utility in stage. My approach would be to copy the MockAnalyticsService class and replace the calls to Jest with console.log statements or debugger statements.

That said, this won't tell you anything about the Segment side of things, because that's not being called locally. It would pretty much just give you the same benefit as the testing - that is, asserting sendTrackEvent was called without content - without needing to write tests. But I think the test would probably be more valuable.

For asserting 2 above, we can test in stage and/or production.

Stage

We do seem to have a SEGMENT_KEY set up in the stage Learning MFE. However, I'm not sure where those events go and whether we can look at them. I'll ask around!

Production
Events sent to Segment in production can be viewed in Snowflake for verification. As you said, this is a very straightforward change, so I think the risk associated with letting this go to production without validation in stage is very low. But it's not zero. If you'd feel more comfortable verifying in stage first, let's see if we can check the stage Segment events somehow.

My recommendation would be throw in a quick Jest test for the call to sendTrackEvent from this thunk and to validate in stage. If it's not possible to validate in stage, I would be comfortable with testing in production, but I'd like other's opinions as well.

I hope this was helpful. Let me know what you think!