Tutorial

Create Heatmaps in Vue with vue-heatmapjs

Published on October 23, 2017
author

Joshua Bemenderfer

Create Heatmaps in Vue with vue-heatmapjs

Heatmaps. A great marketing tool that works by tracking literally every move and click the mouse makes on a webpage, normalizes them, and sends them to a server for whomever might be on the other end to analyze (complete with pretty colors.) A perfectly good and acceptable use of your data and, well, mobile data. Well, if you find yourself needing to implement one of these in your Vue app, vue-heatmapjs is there to help.

Installation

Install vue-heatmapjs in your Vue.js project.

# Yarn
$ yarn add vue-heatmapjs

# NPM
$ npm install vue-heatmapjs --save

Usage

Now enable the plugin in the main Vue setup file.

main.js
import Vue from 'vue';
import App from './App.vue';
import heatmap from 'vue-heatmapjs';

Vue.use(heatmap, {
  // Fired on every click and mousemove.
  // data is an object with xy positions and heat value.
  // It would be a good idea to combine and throttle these before sending.
  afterAdd(data) {
    // Send the data here.
    logUserInteractions(data);
  }
});

new Vue({
  el: '#app',
  render: h => h(App)
});

Now, add the v-heatmap directive to the component you want to track.

App.vue
<template>
  <div id="app" v-heatmap>
    ...
  </div>
</template>

An example of an app with heatmaps. Oooh. Color blobs!

This will render a visual heatmap for all your interactions with the page as seen above. In most cases you won’t want this though. Thankfully you can disable it with v-heatmap="false" and still receive all the events.

App.vue
<template>
  <div id="app" v-heatmap="false">
    ...
  </div>
</template>

Now you no longer have a good excuse when marketing tells you they want heatmaps. Sorry. Have fun finding a better one.

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About the authors
Default avatar
Joshua Bemenderfer

author

While we believe that this content benefits our community, we have not yet thoroughly reviewed it. If you have any suggestions for improvements, please let us know by clicking the “report an issue“ button at the bottom of the tutorial.

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