(Apologies for cross-posting)
Heya,
The mobile team needs accurate pageviews for the alpha and beta mobile
site. Currently, this information is only stored in a cookie, but we don't
want to go the route of starting to store this cookie because of cache
server performance, network performance and privacy policy issues. The
mobile team also needs to be able to diferentiate between initial and
secondary API requests - pages in the beta version of MobileFrontend are
dynamically loaded via the API, meaning that MobileFrontend will might make
multiple API requests to load sections of an article when they are toggled
open up by the user. At the moment, we have no way of diferentiating
between API requests to determine which one should count as a 'pageview'.
We propose that we set two additional custom HTTP headers - one to identify
alpha/beta/stable version of MobileFrontend, the other to be able to
diferentiate between initial and secondary API requests. This would make
logging the necessary information trivial, and we believe it would be
fairly lightweight to implement.
We propose the following two headers with their possible values:
X-MF-Mode: a/b/s (alpha/beta/stable)
X-MF-Req: 1/2 (primary/secondary)
X-MF-Mode would be determined by Varnish based off the existence of the
alpha/beta identifying cookies while X-MF-Req would be set by
MobileFrontend in the backend response.
These headers would only be set on the Varnish servers, on the Squids/Nginx
we will just set a dash ('-') in the log fields.
Questions:
1) Are there objections to the introduction of these two http headers?
2) We would like to aim for a late February deployment, is that an okay
period? (We will announce the real deployment date as well)
3) Are we missing anything important?
Thanks for your feedback!
Best
Arthur & Diederik