Recording without setting the sample rate

[jyunhanlin]

We want to send the recording replay to the sentry when the user clicks the bug report.

After diving into the implementation, it seems need to set up the sessionSampleRate or errorSampleRate (one of them needs to be larger than 0) so that the replay will start recording.

Is it possible to start recording without setting the sample rate so that we can send the replay programmability by the replay.flush()

[Lms24]

Hi @jyunhanlin thanks for writing in! As you said, for now, there's no way around sampling.

If I understand correctly, you'd like to essentially have the errorSampleRate behaviour but the replay should only be sent, if users actively want to report a bug (I assume you're using our feedback dialog for this)? Meaning, our Replay integration would keep the last 60 seconds recorded and send it if that bug report is sent.

[mydea]

Tentatively, I think this could already work (with private APIs, which we could make public), like this:

1. Set replaysOnErrorSampleRate: 1.0 to ensure we always capture replays. This will always keep the last 60 seconds.
2. Use replay._replay.flushImmediate() to send events on-demand. This should send the (up to)the last 60 seconds of data, the same way as if an error occurred.

Could you give that a try? If that works for you, we could make flushImmediate available on the replay integration itself. cc @billyvg

[jyunhanlin]

Hi @mydea thanks for that way. I try the method, and it works. 🎉

Actually, I implemented a similar method with errorSampleRate and replay.flush().
But we want is that the replay integration can do record by replay.start() and replay.stop() without setting any sample rate.
We want to send the recording when there is user feedback report. In other cases, we don't want

[hambro]

I'm in the same boat.
Setting replaysOnErrorSampleRate: 1.0 will send many recordings I'm not interested in, and, fixing the root cause is a pandoras box. So I set a tag before calling replay.flush() with Sentry.setTag('manualReported', true); to make it searchable among the noise.

But I can't do much with the amount of useless replays sent. I didn't quickly find the right place to disable onError-replay submissions either 🙈