dataslayer 1.0
February 28, 2019
dataslayer 1.0 has been released!
It’s been about 5 years since I started working on dataslayer to help me with my own analytics debugging - since then almost 50,000 people have discovered and added it to their toolbox, so it feels appropriate to finally make an official 1.0 release, accompanied by some big but not necessarily obvious changes.
For the past 5 years, the dataslayer interface has been barely held together by glue (but really, jQuery). Redoing this incrementally felt like it would be almost impossible, so I decided to rip off the bandaid and move the entire thing to React. The underlying DOM hasn’t changed much - it’s still mostly <table>s all the way down - but the framework is now in place to make future work much more manageable.
Migrating to React also forced me to think differently about how dataslayer stores and displays the data it captures - more changes are to come on this front as well, but the migration did make it much more straightforward to implement two often-requested features:
- import / export: Historically, there wasn’t any way to get data out of dataslayer. That has now changed! You can export your entire debugging session as JSON, and import a previous session to view what happened in it.
- search / filter: For those of us debugging enormous multi-container, multi-pixel, multi-variable implementations, it’s sometimes been difficult to find the exact item you’re looking for. The new filter mode in dataslayer allows you to search for any key, value, or ID contained in your data or tracking call, and immediately surface it in the UI.