Asynchronous deployment asynchronous-deployment

NOTE
Adobe Experience Platform Launch has been rebranded as a suite of data collection technologies in Adobe Experience Platform. Several terminology changes have rolled out across the product documentation as a result. Please refer to the following document for a consolidated reference of the terminology changes.

Performance and non-blocking deployment of the JavaScript libraries required by our products is increasingly important to Adobe Experience Cloud users. Tools like Google PageSpeed recommend that users change they way they deploy the Adobe libraries on their site. This article explains how to use the Adobe JavaScript libraries in an asynchronous fashion.

Synchronous vs asynchronous

Synchronous deployment

Often, libraries are loaded synchronously in the <head> tag of a page. For example:

<script src="example.js"></script>

By default, the browser parses the document and reaches this line, then starts to fetch the JavaScript file from the server. The browser waits until the file is returned, then it parses and executes the JavaScript file. Finally, it continues parsing the rest of the HTML document.

If the parser comes across the <script> tag before rendering visible content, content display is delayed. If the JavaScript file being loaded is not absolutely necessary to show content to your users, you are unnecessarily requiring your visitors to wait for content. The larger the library, the longer the delay. For this reason, website performance benchmark tools like Google PageSpeed or Lighthouse often flag synchronously loaded scripts.

Tag management libraries can quickly grow large if you have a lot of tags to manage.

Asynchronous deployment

You can load any library asynchronously by adding an async attribute to the <script> tag. For example:

<script src="example.js" async></script>

This indicates to the browser that when this script tag is parsed, the browser should begin loading the JavaScript file, but instead of waiting for the library to be loaded and executed, it should continue to parse and render the rest of the document.

Considerations to asynchronous deployment

As described above, in synchronous deployments, the browser pauses parsing and rendering the page while the Adobe Experience Platform tag library is loaded and executed. In asynchronous deployments, on the other hand, the browser continues parsing and rendering the page while the library loads. The variability of when the tag library might finish loading in relation to page parsing and rendering must be taken into consideration.

First, because the tag library can finish loading before or after the bottom of the page has been parsed and executed, you should no longer call _satellite.pageBottom() from your page code (_satellite won’t be available until after the library has loaded). This is explained in Loading the tags embed code asynchronously.

Second, the tag library can finish loading before or after the DOMContentLoaded browser event (DOM Ready) has occurred.

Because of these two points, it’s worth demonstrating how the Library Loaded, Page Bottom, DOM Ready, and Window Loaded event types from the Core extension function when loading a tag library asynchronously.

If your tag property contains the following four rules:

  • Rule A: uses the Library Loaded event type
  • Rule B: uses the Page Bottom event type
  • Rule C: uses the DOM Ready event type
  • Rule D: uses the Window Loaded event type

Regardless of when the tag library finishes loading, all the rules are guaranteed to be executed and they will be executed in the following order:

Rule A → Rule B → Rule C → Rule D

Although the order is always enforced, some rules might be executed immediately when the tag library finishes loading, while others might be executed later. The following occurs when the tag library finishes loading:

  1. Rule A is executed immediately.
  2. If the DOMContentLoaded browser event (DOM Ready) has already occurred, Rule B and Rule C are executed immediately. Otherwise, Rule B and Rule C are executed later when the DOMContentLoaded browser event occurs.
  3. If the load browser event (Window Loaded) has already occurred, Rule D is executed immediately. Otherwise, Rule D will be executed later when the load browser event occurs. Note that if you’ve installed the tag library according to the instructions, the tag library always finishes loading before the load browser event occurs.

When applying these principles to your own website, consider the following:

  • A rule using the Library Loaded event type might execute before your data layer is fully loaded. This can result in the rule’s actions executing with missing data because the data was not yet available on the page. These types of issues can be mitigated by tweaking your rule configuration. As an example, instead of having a rule triggered by the Library Loaded event type, you could instead use the Custom Event or Direct Call event type that are triggered by your page code as soon as your data layer finishes loading.
  • The Page Bottom event type doesn’t particularly provide value when the library is loaded asynchronously. Instead, consider the Library Loaded, DOM Ready, Window Loaded, or other event types.

If you see things occurring out of order, it is likely that you have some timing issues to work through. Deployments requiring precise timing might need to use event listeners and the Custom Event or Direct Call event type to make their implementations more robust and consistent.

Loading the tags embed code asynchronously

Tags provide a toggle to turn on asynchronous loading when creating an embed code when you configure an environment. You can also configure asynchronous loading yourself:

  1. Add an async attribute to the <script> tag to load the script asynchronously.

    For the tags embed code, that means changing this:

    code language-markup
    <script src="//www.yoururl.com/launch-EN1a3807879cfd4acdc492427deca6c74e.min.js"></script>
    

    to this:

    code language-markup
    <script src="//www.yoururl.com/launch-EN1a3807879cfd4acdc492427deca6c74e.min.js" async></script>
    
  2. Remove any code you may have previously added at the bottom of your tag:

    code language-markup
    <script type="text/javascript">_satellite.pageBottom();</script>
    

    This code tells Platform that the browser parser has reached the bottom of the page. It is likely that tags will not have loaded and executed before this time, therefore calling _satellite.pageBottom() results in an error and the Page Bottom event type may not behave as expected.

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