Use external data in a workflow

Campaign comes with several workflow activities you can use to interact with data from your external database(s):

  • Filter on external data - Use the Query activity to add external data and use it in the defined filter configurations.

  • Create sub-sets - Use the Split activity to create sub-sets. You can use external data to define the filtering criteria to use.

  • Load external database - Use the external data in the Data loading (RDBMS) activity.

  • Adding information and links - Use the Enrichment activity to add additional data to the worktable of the workflow, and links to an external table. In this context, it can use data from an external database.

You can also directly define a connection to an external database from all the workflow activities listed above, for a temporary usage. In this case, it will be on a local external database, to be used only within the current workflow.

CAUTION
This type of configuration must only be used temporary to collect data. The external account configuration should be preferred for any other usage.

For example, in the Query activity, you can define a temporary connection to an external database as follows:

  1. Open the activity and click the Add data…
  2. Select the External data options
  3. Select the Locally defining the data source option
  4. Select the target database engine in the drop-down list. Enter the name of the server and provide the authentication parameters. Also specify the name of the external database.
  5. Select the table where the data is stored. You can enter the name of the table directly in the corresponding field or click the edit icon to access the list of the database tables.
  6. Click the Add button to define one or several reconciliation fields between the external database data and the data in the Adobe Campaign database. The Edit expression icons of the Remote field and Local field gives you access to the list of fields of each of the tables.
  7. If necessary, specify a filtering condition and the data sorting mode.
  8. Select the additional data to be collected in the external database. To do this, double click on the fields(s) that you want to add to display them in the Output columns.
  9. Click Finish to confirm this configuration.