`beforeSend` is not called for user feedback

[p-himik]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have checked for existing issues https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-javascript/issues
• I have reviewed the documentation https://docs.sentry.io/
• I am using the latest SDK release https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-javascript/releases

How do you use Sentry?

Sentry Saas (sentry.io)

Which SDK are you using?

@sentry/react

SDK Version

8.19.0

Framework Version

React 17.0.2

Link to Sentry event

No response

SDK Setup/Reproduction Example

No response

Steps to Reproduce

1. Log what's going on in beforeSend
2. Use captureFeedback
3. Check the logs

Expected Result

The docstring of beforeSend says:

An event-processing callback for error and message events, guaranteed to be invoked after all other event
processors, which allows an event to be modified or dropped.

I don't know how exactly to interpret "message events", but to me it seems generic enough to include user feedback events as well.
Of course, I might be missing something, but judging by the source code of processBeforeSend, beforeSend isn't called at all for anything but errors.

My particular use-case is that I put a lot of data into breadcumbs that I then preprocess in beforeSend. I want to avoid doing it when nothing is actually being sent to avoid doing extra work.
I'm now trying to switch from capturing user feedback with uncaught exception to an explicit call to captureFeedback, but it seems that it's not possible at the moment.

Given that beforeSend is used only for errors and only accepts ErrorEvent, it might make sense to add beforeSendFeedback or some more generic version of beforeSend.

Actual Result

beforeSend is never called for feedback messages.

[p-himik]

As a workaround I suppose I can use client.on("beforeSendEvent", ...), even though its docstring says:

This is called right before an event is sent and should not be used to mutate the event.

Update: or maybe not - just using the existing beforeSend handler there leads to the HTTP request being accepted, but not event of any kind in the web UI. Oh well, back to the exception-backed feedback then.

[mydea]

Hello,

beforeSend is only called for things captured via e.g. Sentry.captureException() or Sentry.captureEvent(), so error or message events. Feedback events are not covered by it.

You can use an event processor for this, this should cover the vast majority of things (we rarely (never?) add breadcrumbs in there I believe):

Sentry.addEventProcessor(event => {
  if(event.type === 'feedback') {
    // mutate event
  }
  return event;
});

Does that work for you?

We could add a beforeSendFeedback hook, but this is not planned as of today - we'll discuss it in our planning for the future!

[p-himik]

@mydea Thanks! It seems to work indeed so I'm closing the issue.

However it's still very unlikely that I'll be using the feedback functionality. It's just way too confusing compared to plain errors:

• Feedback messages can end up in spam, and it doesn't seem like I have any control over it
• All attachments seem to be treated as images
• The UI doesn't work properly (sometimes a feedback item doesn't get loaded, sometimes the linked error doesn't
• Even though I did it just as the docs described (calling both captureMessage and captureFeedback with the stored event ID), there seem to be two issues created for the same piece of feedback

That's just the things I noticed after 10 minutes of tinkering, so I'd say that the most reasonable thing for me to do is to pretend the "User Feedback" panel doesn't exist at all and instead rely on the plain "Issues" panel. :)

[bruno-garcia]

@p-himik Thank you for leaving your feedback and reasons. I'd like to try addressing some of them though, and hopefully hear your thoughts about them:

Feedback messages can end up in spam, and it doesn't seem like I have any control over it

You can turn off the spam detection feature in the project settings:

For context, we added a spam detection feature to help user that have a high number of feedback where many tend to be spammy. The goal was to reduce potential spammy alerts to our users. More context here:

• [Epic] User Feedback Spam Filtering sentry#61372

All attachments seem to be treated as images

That was indeed our first version. We received a GitHub ticket about this yesterday and @michellewzhang already got a PR up to improve this:

• ref(feedback): add visualization for non-image attachments and allow download sentry#74802

Even though I did it just as the docs described (calling both captureMessage and captureFeedback with the stored event ID), there seem to be two issues created for the same piece of feedback

The original User Feedback feature of Sentry was built to optionally collect feedback from a user after an error happened. Hence it required an event_id. The "old" function to capture feedback, called captureUserFeedback required that id for that reason.

But we since changed the product to allow feedback's outside an error event. We did that while building the new web widget.
The new function added is captureFeedback and **doesn't require an event_id. So you shouldn't need to call captureMessage when calling this function, it's optional.

I do see now that our docs' first snippet include the captureMessage example. We'll improve the docs to avoid further confusion.

The UI doesn't work properly (sometimes a feedback item doesn't get loaded, sometimes the linked error doesn't

This indicates we have a bug. If you reload the page, does it show up then? I'm trying to understand if it's reproducible or something else we should be looking at. Could you please raise a ticket about this? We definitely want to fix any issues such as this.

[p-himik]

You can turn off the spam detection feature in the project settings

Ah, I see, thanks! I was trying to find a relevant button on the User Feeback panel itself.

We received a GitHub ticket about this yesterday and @michellewzhang already got a PR up to improve this

Good to know!

This indicates we have a bug. If you reload the page, does it show up then?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Haven't actually measured it but tried switching between items/pages and reloading the current page for a total of ~15-20 times and it feels like something wasn't working properly around 40% of the time.
Just in case - I'm in Cyprus and while my internet connection is alright, the latency might sometimes be too high and make responses arrive out-of-order. So if there's an implicit dependency between requests, it would definitely be a problem.

Could you please raise a ticket about this? We definitely want to fix any issues such as this.

Sure, I'll also see if I can record it so that the issue has a bit more "meat" to it.
Update: created getsentry/sentry#74841. I think all of the issues with stuff not loading on that page were due to very long response times, so I decided not to record it and instead post a screenshot of the Network tab in DevTools.