Manually Recording Insights Session Playbacks

Last Updated April 15, 2022

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Brief Overview

Once you have enabled Session Playback collection level, Insights begins collecting every user interaction with your platform and converting them to replayable session recreations, known as Session Playbacks.

In the event that too many of your limited Session Playbacks are being used to record portions of user sessions that you are not interested in viewing, you can now use an API call to control when Session Playback will begin. This way, you can control whether or not a particular session is collected using Session Playback and is therefore counted against your limited Session Playback allotment.

Once you have toggled on the Session Playback Recording Manually setting, the default collection mode of all sessions will change from Session Playback to Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) (at which point interactions are collected but sessions are not re-created for Session Playback, and are therefore not counted against your session limit), and the WalkMe Player will wait for an API call to change the recording mode from Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) back to Session Playback for the current session.

Configuring Session Playback Recording Manually

1. Go to insights.walkme.com
2. Go to the requested environment and click Environment Settings
3. Go to the Session Playback Settings tab
4. Toggle ON Start Session Playback Recording Manually
5. Add a call to "WalkMeInsightsAPI.startPlaybackRecording()" on the client side in order to set the collection mode to Session Playback

Client Side Implementation

To start capturing the Session Playback for the current session, call:

• WalkMeInsightsAPI.startPlaybackRecording()

To make sure the API call invokes only after Insights has loaded successfully, you can populate a callback function in the following window property:

• window.onWalkMeInsightsAPIReady

Once Insights has loaded on your site, the function stored in this attribute will be invoked.

To stop the recording manually, call:

• WalkMeInsightsAPI.stopRecording()

Code Examples (jQuery)

• Start recording once the user clicks on a target button:

  $( "#target" ).click(function() {
  WalkMeInsightsAPI.startPlaybackRecording()
  });

• Start recording once the user visits a specific URL:

  // IMPORTANT NOTE: this code must appear before the WalkMe snippet.
  window.onWalkMeInsightsAPIReady = function() {
  if(window.location.href === "http://example.com/home"){
  WalkMeInsightsAPI.startPlaybackRecording()
  }
  }

• Record only admin users:

  // IMPORTANT NOTE: this code must appear before the WalkMe snippet.
  window.onWalkMeInsightsAPIReady = function() {
  if(myUser.role.toLowerCase() === "admin"){
  WalkMeInsightsAPI.startPlaybackRecording()
  }
  }

Important Notes

• Once the client-side API is called, the current sessions will be counted as Session Playback sessions;
• When calling the client-side API multiple times in a single session, sessions will still be counted as single Session Playback sessions;
• Currently, once a session is recorded in Session Playback collection mode, there is no way to change it back to Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) mode;
• Sections of sessions that were recorded in Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) mode will not support Session Playback, but the events of these sessions will still be collected;
• Once the API call (WalkMeInsightsAPI.startPlaybackRecording) is made, the rest of the session will be replayable (i.e., will be recorded in Session Playback collection mode).