Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

[Pendo] initialize pendo with segment anonymous_id

Open
  • Is something wrong?
#707 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript
Domain
api

Research direction

Start by reading the referenced analytics-next browser initialization flow and the Pendo integration in integrations/pendo/lib/index.js, especially its identify behavior. Reproduce initialization through Segment with an anonymous_id, then trace whether Pendo receives it before integrations load. Done means Pendo receives the Segment anonymous ID during initialization without overwriting existing Pendo visitor or account data.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

When using pendo through segment, the segment anonymous id does not always reach pendo. I am not entirely sure what the issue in this library is, but it is likely related to issues: #317, #325, and #349.

It seems like the pendo integration is initialized before segment. I came to this conclusion after seeing this comment

With AJS classic, we allow users to call setAnonymousId before the library initialization.
This is important because some of the destinations will use the anonymousId during the initialization,
and if we set anonId afterwards, that wouldn’t impact the destination.

Also Ensures events can be registered before library initialization.
This is important so users can register to 'initialize' and any events that may fire early during setup.

in analytics-next library and then attempting to call setAnonymousId before segment is initialized. This change should ensure that it is flushed and create a segment anonymous id before the integrations are loaded/initialized however even after this change the pendo destination was not receiving that segment anonymous id even though it did exist.

A temporary fix for this is hooking into segments 'initialize' event and forcing the expected pendo behavior (the stuff that the pendo integration does on identify):

   // analytics.js snippet file
    analytics.setAnonymousId();

    analytics.on("initialize", function () {
      // we want to make sure that we use segments pendoified anonymous id or
      // segments user id
      var isUserAnonymous = !this._user.id();
      var id = isUserAnonymous
        ? "_PENDO_T_" + this._user.anonymousId()
        : this._user.id();

      // pendo options only requires visitor/account metadata
      var options = {};
      var visitor = Object.assign({ id: id }, this._user.traits());
      options.visitor = visitor;
      var account = Object.assign(
        { id: this._group.id() },
        this._group.traits()
      );
      options.account = account;

      // ensure that on initialize pendo will have segment data and that if
      // segment data already exists it is not overwritten
      window.pendo_options.visitor = Object.assign(
        options.visitor,
        window.pendo_options.visitor
      );
      window.pendo_options.account = Object.assign(
        options.account,
        window.pendo_options.account
      );
    }); 
    
    analytics.load()
Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
125
Forks
134
Avg merge
2d 53m
Merged PRs (30d)
2

Getting set up

  • No Dockerfile or Docker Compose file
  • Has a pull request template
  • No contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from segmentio/analytics.js-integrations

All issues in segmentio/analytics.js-integrations

Similar issues

More JavaScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.