Is it possible to add additional user defined properties other than standard properties in "keen" object?

Question

As for every keen event, keen object gets automatically attached with structure of keen object.

var keen_event = {
 "keen": {
  "created_at": "2012-12-14T20:24:01.123000+00:00",
  "timestamp": "2012-12-14T20:24:01.123000+00:00",
  "id": "asd9fadifjaqw9asdfasdf939"
 },
 other properties...
}

But I want to add other custom properties in keen object as;

 {
 "keen": {
  "created_at": "2012-12-14T20:24:01.123000+00:00",
  "timestamp": "2012-12-14T20:24:01.123000+00:00",
  "id": "asd9fadifjaqw9asdfasdf939",
  "event_type" : "some_values",
  ...
 }
}

I tried adding other properties on keen and than encode the keen_event as:

var encodedData = base64.encode(JSON.stringify(keen_event));

The encoded data is then passed on keen api to create an event but I am getting error as : "Invalid property for keen namespace. You used: \'event_type\'".

Is there a solution for that? Is it possible to add custom key value properties other than standard properties on " keen" object while creating an keen event? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

No, this isn't allowed in the Keen API. The keen namespace is reserved and only a small handful of properties (such as keen.timestamp or keen.addons) may be specified in that namespace when an event is written. The namespace is reserved to allow Keen to add new special-purpose properties in the future and not worry about collisions with user-defined properties. (See also: https://keen.io/docs/api/#the-keen-object.)

Perhaps it's worth stepping back and asking: why do you want to add custom properties to the keen namespace? What would it allow you to do that you couldn't do with, say, my.keen.x or keen_custom.x?

FYI: I'm a platform engineer at Keen :)