event function doesn't throw an error when an event value is not supported by GA

[cbrwizard]

Hey, I've just spent a couple hours debugging this and I think there is a room for improvement here.

At one point my events stopped being displayed in GA, while the universal-analytics was not throwing any errors.

Here is my code:

  new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    try {
        const eventParams = {
          action: 'passed funMetric',
          category: 'business',
          value: userId, // a string UUID
        }

        GA.event( // GA is a universal-analytics instance
          eventParams.category,
          eventParams.action,
          eventParams.label,
          eventParams.value,
          (err) => {
            if (err) {
              logger.error({ err })
              throw err
            } else {
              logger.info(
                { ...eventParams, userId },
                'Created a GA event'
              )
              resolve()
            }
          }
        )
      }
    } catch (err) {
      logger.error({ err })
      reject(err)
    }
  })

I was getting 'Created a GA event' in my console, indicating that everything went fine. But it wasn't.

Randomly I've changed the value to 1 and it started working. I've checked the documentation https://github.com/peaksandpies/universal-analytics/blob/master/AcceptableParams.md#event-value it doesn't say anything about a requirement for a value to be a number. A string is also a non-negative value, right?

Here are the possible solutions for this issue:

1. Best one: wait for GA to respond to a sent event and check if it was successful. If it's not - raise an error.
2. In a event function check that, when passed, the value is an integer.
3. Update the docs to indicate that only integers are supported.

What do you think?

[BrandonCopley]

I am having the same problem, a string does not work and no error is being thrown. I think this module should attempt to convert strings to numbers and send to Google, but I don't know if Google is throwing errors here.