Setting up the Analytics SDK Server with Node.js

Step 1 - Create the Node.js Project

1 - Open a command line and create a directory named reveal-server-node

> mkdir reveal-server-node

2 - Change the command line path to the newly created directory

> cd reveal-server-node

3 - Initialize npm in the directory

> npm init -y

4 - Install the express framework

> npm install express

5 - Open the project in VS Code

> code .

6 - Create a new file named main.js, and intialize add the following code

var express = require('express');

const app = express();

app.listen(8080, () => {
    console.log(`Analytics server accepting http requests`);
});

Step 2 - Add Analytics SDK

1 - Install the Analytics SDK for Node.js

> npm install reveal-sdk-node

2 - Modify the main.js file to add Analytics

var express = require('express');
var reveal = require('reveal-sdk-node');

const app = express();

//add reveal sdk
app.use('/', reveal());

app.listen(8080, () => {
    console.log(`Analytics server accepting http requests`);
});

Step 3 - Create the Dashboards Folder

1 - In Visual STudio Code, click the New Folder button in the Explorer and name it dashboards. The folder MUST be named dashboards

By default, the Analytics SDK uses a convention that will load all dashboards from the dashboards folder. You can change this convention by creating a custom IRVDashboardProvider.

Step 4 - Setup CORS Policy (Debugging)

While developing and debugging your application, it is common to host the server and client app on different URLs. For example; your Server my be running on https://localhost:24519, while your Angular app may be running on https://localhost:4200. If you were to try and load a dashboard from the client application, it would fail because of a Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policy. To enable this scenario, you must create a CORS policy and enable it in the server project.

1 - Install cors package

> npm install cors

2 - Modify the main.js file to enable cors

var express = require('express');
var cors = require('cors');
var reveal = require('reveal-sdk-node');

const app = express();

app.use(cors()); // DEVELOPMENT only! In production, configure appropriately.

app.use('/', reveal());

app.listen(8080, () => {
    console.log(`Analytics server accepting http requests`);
});

Step 5 - Start the Node.js Server

The final step is to start the Node.js server by runnning the following command:

> node main.js

Next Steps:

Note

The source code to this sample can be found on GitHub.