Configure data sources

This is Russ Lewis with Adobe, and I’m here today to show you data sources in Journey Optimizer. The learning objectives of this video are explain what a data source is, configure the platform data source, and configure an external or custom data source. So first, what is a data source? Put simply, a data source is something that Journey Optimizer can request data from on demand. It can be used to find the answer to a question like is my customer in the gold member segment? Or it can be used to personalize an action, like sending the last product purchased via an SMS. Now that you know what a data source is, let’s dive into configuring the Experience Platform data source.

Journey Optimizer can read profile attributes and behavioral history from the real-time profile on the platform.

To access this data, we need to configure the fields you’d like available from the profile in the out-of-the-box Experience Platform data source. On my screen here, you’ll see in my recent objects, the Experience Platform data source are already listed. I’ll show you that you can access this through the left-hand navigation menu by clicking on configurations.

The screen that appears shows you data sources Here, you can see the Experience Platform data source is at the bottom. This is a data source that is created by the system and automatically deployed with every single instance of Journey Optimizer.

When I open it, you’ll see the first few field group that is automatically enabled and cannot be modified, the name cannot be modified, is the profile field group. You can go ahead and choose the fields that you would like to come in this profile field group.

A field group is a collection of XDM fields that you select from the union schema. This is a collection of all the profile attributes that are from the profile class in the platform. When I click on fields, you’ll see a list come up, and you’ll see everything that’s available from platform.

Things like city, country code, street, phone numbers, and you’re free to select as many or as little as you would like.

This screen will also tell you how many journeys the data source is used in. If you’d like to see them, you can click the eyeball and it will open another tab and show you the journeys that are using this data source.

If I go back to my screen of data sources, you can see I can also set the cache. This cache indicates how long the data will be held before it’s retrieved again as part of a journey. You can add as many field groups as you would like, and we recommend that you categorize them according to the type of data they are. So, you can see here, we have some data from experience events, and also some custom classes that we’ve established in this instance around point of interest data, or order information. Once you’re comfortable with the field groups that you’ve added, you can go ahead and click save.

Now, for the final learning objective in this section, we’ll go over how to create a custom data source or external data source. Here on the data source screen, I’ll click create data source. I can give this a name. And for this example, we’ll connect to a weather service to grab the temperature. Here, we start with the end point or URL of where we want to go. I have the documentation for this already open. So, I’ll pick this weather service API, paste it in here, and you’ll know a couple of parameters in this that we’ll need to make dynamic. So, the first one for authentication, let’s go ahead and use this app ID parameter. We’ll put it here. And then I have an API key that I’ll insert into this other section. Note that whatever I paste is automatically obfuscated. So, you can’t see it. Also, we’ll go ahead and paste in what this end point is going to return. You see this name value pair of q equals city name. Here, that’s that dynamic value that the end point expects. So, I’ll go ahead and type in q and that’ll take care of that piece. Now for the response payload, I’ll open this up and it’s asking me to paste in some JSON. Here, I’ll go ahead and go to the weather fields in API response. I’ll copy this payload and I will paste it into journeys here. Looks like it doesn’t have the right payload format. So let me go ahead and manually copy this, see if that fixes it. There we go. And you’ll see that the values are automatically detected here, what type they are and the label it carries over. So, you can see temperatures are passed and I can use these from my data source. So, I’ll hit save. And then here it looks like my URL is missing https.

So now, go ahead and save that. And now my data sources ready. An important thing to know our guardrail that we have in the system regarding data sources is that external data sources, we automatically cap the rate at which this data source is queried to 15 calls per second. If you’d like to increase this limit, you can use the capping API, which is documented on our website to increase that throughput to match whatever you are comfortable with. Thanks and we look forward to using data sources in a later video. -