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MARKETING FACTORY / UNOMI INTEGRATION GUIDE MARKETING FACTORY 1.6


© 2002 – 2016 Jahia Solutions Group SA / 43

SUMMARY

1 INTEGRATING WITH UNOMI ........................................................................................................................ 4

2 CONCEPTS .............................................................................................................................................................. 5

2.1 Items and scopes ................................................................................................................. 5

2.2 Events ...................................................................................................................................... 5

2.3 Profiles .................................................................................................................................... 6

2.4 Items and types .................................................................................................................... 6

2.5 Providing context to Unomi ............................................................................................ 7

2.5.1 Using Marketing Factory ................................................................................................. 7

2.5.2 Without Marketing Factory ............................................................................................ 8

2.5.3 Using neither Marketing Factory, nor Digital Experience Manager .............. 9

3 INTERACTING WITH THE CONTEXT SERVER .................................................................................... 10

4 DX INTEGRATION EXAMPLE ...................................................................................................................... 11

4.1 Component overview ..................................................................................................... 11

4.2 Using the REST API ......................................................................................................... 11

4.2.1 Dealing with authentication ........................................................................................ 12

4.2.2 Twitter API setup ............................................................................................................. 13

4.2.3 Callback utility functions .............................................................................................. 13

4.2.4 Calling to Unomi ............................................................................................................... 15

4.3 Using a context request and a Unomi plugin ......................................................... 18

4.3.1 Digital Experience Manager component ................................................................ 18

4.3.2 Unomi plugin overview .................................................................................................. 23

4.3.3 Plugin architecture .......................................................................................................... 23

4.3.4 Rule definition ................................................................................................................... 25

4.3.5 Action definition ............................................................................................................... 26

4.3.6 Action executor definition ............................................................................................ 27



4.3.7 Action executor implementation ............................................................................... 27

5 PERSONALIZATION API ................................................................................................................................ 29

5.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 29

5.2 Content personalization rendering API .................................................................. 29

5.3 Proper session and profile tracking .......................................................................... 35

5.3.1 DX Login session integration ....................................................................................... 36

5.4 Typical personalization flows ...................................................................................... 37

5.4.1 Anonymous ......................................................................................................................... 38

5.4.2 Authenticated .................................................................................................................... 39

6 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................................... 43



1 INTEGRATING WITH UNOMI

Apache Unomi is the reference implementation of the upcoming OASIS Context Server (CXS)

standard to help standardize personalization of online experience while promoting ethical web

experience management and increased user privacy controls.

We will assume that you are familiar with git operations since the code examples are located in a

git repository and will require being able to retrieve the code from that repository and switch

branches to be able to run the examples. Also, the examples are targeted at Jahia Digital

Experience Manager integrators in the form of an example Digital Experience Manager module.

However, the concepts and implementations could also be transposed to other tools, albeit with

some adjustments.



2 CONCEPTS

Apache Unomi gathers information about users actions, information that is processed and stored

by Unomi services. The collected information can then be used to personalize content, derive

insights on user behavior, categorize the profiles into segments along user-definable dimensions

or acted upon by algorithms.

2.1 ITEMS AND SCOPES

Unomi structures the information it collects using the concept of Item which provides the base

the context server needs to process and store the data. Items are persisted according to their type

(structure) and identifier (identity). This base structure can be extended, if needed, using

properties in the form of key-value pairs.

Additionally, tracked items are also gathered by scope which allows the context server to group

together related items. Scopes usually pertain to a given site being analyzed, though they can span

across sites depending on the desired analysis granularity. Scopes allow clients accessing the

context server to filter data to only see relevant data.

{ itemType: <type of the item>, scope: <scope>, itemId: <item identifier>, properties: <optional properties> }

Unomi defines a built-in scope (called systemscope) that clients can use to share data across

scopes.

2.2 EVENTS

Users' actions are conveyed from clients to the context server using events. Of course, the

required information depends on what is collected and users' interactions with the observed

systems but events minimally provide a type, a scope and source and target items. You can

imagine an event as being a sentence, the event's type being the verb, the source the subject and

the target the object:



{ eventType: <type of the event>, scope: <scope of the event>, source: <Item>, target: <Item>, properties: <optional properties> }

2.3 PROFILES

By processing events, Unomi progressively builds a picture of who the user is and how they

behave. This knowledge is embedded in Profile objects. A profile is an Item with any number of

properties and optional segments and scores. Unomi provides default properties to cover

common data (name, last name, age, email, etc.) as well as default segments to categorize users.

Unomi users are, however, free and even encouraged to create additional properties and

segments to better suit their needs.

2.4 ITEMS AND TYPES

Any information that is processed by and stored in Unomi is structured as an Item. However,

items only define a basic, generic structure. Types provide additional structure and semantics to

generic items. By defining a new type, users specify which properties (including the type of value

they accept) are available to items of that specific type.

Some types can be dynamically defined at runtime by calling the REST API while other extensions

are done via Unomi plugins. Part of extending Unomi, therefore, is a matter of defining new types

and specifying which kind of Unomi entity (e.g. profiles) they can be affected to. For example, the

following JSON document can be passed to Unomi to declare a new property type identified (and

named) tweetNb, tagged with the social tag, targeting profiles and using the integer value

type.

{ itemId: 'tweetNb', itemType: 'propertyType', metadata: { id: 'tweetNb', name: 'tweetNb' }, tags: ['social'], target: 'profiles',



type: 'integer' }

Unomi defines default value types: date, email, integer and string, all pretty self-explanatory.

While you can think of these value types as "primitive" types, it is possible to extend Unomi by

providing additional value types.

2.5 PROVIDING CONTEXT TO UNOMI

In order to be able to build a profile based on user actions, Unomi requires data. This data is

provided by clients which can choose how to do so. A convenient way to store and provide that

contextual information is to leverage the Customer Experience Digital Data Layer digitalData

object that is injected into the browser’s window object.

2.5.1 Using Marketing Factory

Jahia Marketing Factory makes it easier to provide the required information to the context server

by automatically populating and injecting the digitalData object for the benefit of any

javascript application running on a site for which Marketing Factory has been activated.

Marketing Factory populates the digitalData object with metadata that can be sent to the

context server, notably the scope configured for the site (which is usually the site's key), metadata

about the site and the current page. Marketing Factory also adds to this data the base URL for the

context server:

window.digitalData = { "scope" : <current scope>, "site" : { "siteInfo":{ "siteID": <site identifier> } }, "page" : { "pageInfo": { "pageID": <page identifier>, "pageName": <page name>, "pagePath": <relative path of the page from the site root>, "destinationURL": <the current URL>, "referringURL": <the URL from which we came from if any>, "language": <the current language> }, "category":{},



"attributes":{} }, "contextServerPublicUrl" : <base URL where the context server is configured> }

After Marketing Factory loads the initial page the user is viewing, it contacts the context server to

retrieve default context information automatically. This results in a cxs object being injected in

the global javascript variable space, thus making it available to any javascript code running on the

page:

cxs = { profileId: <identifier of the current user's profile>, sessionId: <identifier of the current user's session>, profileProperties: <optional, mapping profile property names to their values>, sessionProperties: <optional, mapping session property names to their values>, profileSegments: <optional array of segments the user matches>, filteringResults: <optional array of filtering results>, trackedConditions: <optional array of tracked conditions> }

Since the cxs object contains the identifiers for the profile and session associated with our user,

we could use this information to retrieve more details from the context server.

2.5.2 Without Marketing Factory

If you are not using Marketing Factory, it is still possible (of course!) to provide context to Unomi.

You, however, require a little bit more work. In order to replicate the digitalFactory object as

provided by Marketing Factory in your Digital Experience Manager components, you could use

the following code in your JSPs:

<%--@elvariable id="renderContext" type="org.jahia.services.render.RenderContext"--%> <%--@elvariable id="resource" type="org.jahia.services.render.Resource"--%> <c:set var="scriptURL" value='${renderContext.request.secure ? "https://localhost:9443" : "http://localhost:8181"}'/> <c:set var="pageName" value='${fn:escapeXml(resource.node.displayableName)}'/> <template:addResources type="inlinejavascript"> <script type="application/javascript"> window.digitalData = window.digitalData || { "scope": "${renderContext.site.siteKey}", "site": {



"siteInfo": { "siteID": "${resource.node.resolveSite.identifier}" } }, "page": { "pageInfo": { "pageID": "${resource.node.identifier}", "pageName": "${pageName}", "pagePath": "${resource.node.path}", "destinationURL": document.location.href, "referringURL": document.referrer, "language": "${resource.locale}" } }, "contextServerPublicUrl": "${scriptURL}" }; </script> </template:addResources>

Note, however, that we hardcode the Unomi server’s URL in the javascript.

2.5.3 Using neither Marketing Factory, nor Digital Experience Manager

Of course, you can still interact with Unomi without either Marketing Factory or Digital

Experience Manager, you would just need to provide the appropriate contextual information

based on your application needs and constraints.



3 INTERACTING WITH THE CONTEXT SERVER

There are essentially two modalities to interact with the context server, reflecting different types

of Unomi users: context server clients and context server integrators.

Context server clients are usually web applications or content management systems. They

interact with Unomi by providing raw, uninterpreted contextual data in the form of events and

associated metadata. That contextual data is then processed by the context server to be fed to

clients once actionable. In that sense context server clients are both consumers and producers of

contextual data. Context server clients will mostly interact with Unomi using the

ContextServlet, requesting context for the current user and providing any triggered events

along the way.

On the other hand, context server integrators provide ways to feed more structured data to the

context server either to integrate with third party services or to provide analysis of the

uninterpreted data provided by context server clients. Such integration will mostly be done using

Unomi's API either directly using Unomi plugins or via the provided REST APIs.



4 DX INTEGRATION EXAMPLE

We will examine how a Jahia Digital Experience Manager component can interact with Unomi to

enrich a user's profile. The use case we will follow is a rather simple one: we want to create a

tweet button component that can record the number of times the user tweeted (as a tweetNb

integer property) as well as the URLs they tweeted from (as a tweetedFrom multi-valued string

property).

We will assume that Marketing Factory is installed and configured for the site on which the

component is to be deployed. While this step is not strictly necessary, this makes accessing the

context server much easier and we will not examine what would be involved with accessing

Unomi without Marketing Factory installed.

4.1 COMPONENT OVERVIEW

The code for the Digital Experience Manager component can be found at:

https://github.com/metacosm/unomi-tweet-button.

The component we will develop in this example is fairly simple and consists of a simple

droppableContent called smp:twitterButton. The view for the component is really simple and

uses the standard Twitter button but defines a javascript resource called twitterButton.js

which performs the actual interaction with Unomi. This javascript code has been developed in two

different versions depending on how we interact with Unomi. Also depending on that access

modality, the component might need some supporting cast as we will see below.

4.2 USING THE REST API

Let's first look at the Digital Experience Manager component and try to use the Unomi's REST API

to achieve our goal for a pure client-side solution.

In order to see the code for this version, you will need to switch to the using-api branch of the

code (git co using-api).



4.2.1 Dealing with authentication

Since the Unomi API is protected behind a login, we will first need to be able to provide our

authentication information to the context server. To make things transparent for the component,

the solution we've chosen among the ones available to us will leverage the existing information

provided by a properly set-up Marketing Factory in the form of a filter injecting a globally-scoped

javascript variable called CXSAuthenticationHeader into Digital Experience Manager pages.

This is not very subtle but this will do for the purpose of this example.

This variable will provide a Basic Authentication header token ready to be sent along our REST

requests. The filter is called CXSSettingsInjectorFilter:

public String execute(String previousOut, RenderContext renderContext, Resource resource, RenderChain chain) throws Exception { final String siteKey = renderContext.getSite().getSiteKey(); ContextServerSettings contextServerSettings = contextServerSettingsService.getSettings(siteKey); if (contextServerSettings == null) { // force a reload of settings contextServerSettingsService.afterPropertiesSet(); // and re-attempt to get the settings contextServerSettings = contextServerSettingsService.getSettings(siteKey); if (contextServerSettings == null) { logger.error("Couldn't retrieve the settings for site " + siteKey + ". The twitter button component won't be working."); return previousOut; } } previousOut += "<script type=\"text/javascript\">var " + CXSAUTHORIZATION_HEADER + " ='" + generateBasicAuth(contextServerSettings) + "';</script>"; return previousOut; }

This solution is not as elegant as it could be. The idea was to leverage the existing settings service

to retrieve the Unomi configuration from Marketing Factory. However, the service is not

currently exposed for consumption in external modules thus requiring us to perform some

"hacks" to get it to work how we would like to. In particular, were the service cleanly exposed, it

would react to changes to the settings, which is not currently the case. This explains also the tricky

bit about reloading the settings if we couldn't retrieve them on first attempt for our site.



Also, since our retrieved service instance doesn't react to settings changes, we also requires a

Digital Experience Manager EventListener to listen to updates to the settings node and inform

the filter that it will need to regenerate the token on its next invocation. The listener is called

CXSSettingsChangeListener and is also fairly straightforward.

Filter and listener are set up as usual using a Spring configuration file.

Another option here would be to retrieve the settings directly from JCR but that would be more

brittle since we would need to know how the information is stored by Marketing Factory and

would be exposed in case the internals changed, though, to be fair, the listener already requires

the name of the settings node in JCR.

4.2.2 Twitter API setup

Let's now look at the javascript code: twitterButton.js.

The first section of the file is strictly twitter-related, so not particularly interesting for our

purpose: we're loading the twitter widget asynchronously. We then register a callback that should

be called when the widget is ready via the ready function. The callback function is the interesting

part: it registers another callback that gets called any time the twitter widget emits the tweet

event:

twttr.events.bind('tweet', function (event) { ... }

The callback we provide the Twitter API is where the magic happens: our user has tweeted so

that's where we want to update their profile.

4.2.3 Callback utility functions

First, we register some utility functions to deal with calling to the Unomi REST API via AJAX calls:

we define a default error callback (defaultErrorCallback) to be used in case the AJAX call goes

wrong, we define a function to ease the creation of CORS requests since it's likely our Unomi

server runs on a different server than the Digital Experience Manager one (createCORSRequest)

and finally we create a function to perform the actual AJAX call (performXHRRequest). These

functions should actually be reusable in your project and not particularly interesting here. We will

just talk briefly about some salient points of the performXHRRequest function:



4.2.4 Calling to Unomi

Let's now look at the Unomi REST calls. We will use a little helpful library (async.js) to simplify the

sequence of calls since we need to make sure that some calls are performed before others can

happen and in an asynchronous world, this can be a little challenging if we want to avoid nested

callbacks (the so-called “callback hell”). async.js provides numerous functions but we will only

use one of them: series which works by specifying an array of functions to be executed

sequentially, calling a callback when done (we won't be using the callback either actually).

First, we need to make sure that Unomi knows about the property types we want to use to enrich

our users' profiles. In order to do that, we will ask Unomi to retrieve all property types tagged with

the social tag, which we will use for our property types, and check if any of the returned

property types match the ones we're interested in. If we can't find them, then we need to create

these property types.

To create these property types, we send the new property type as JSON data to the Unomi

/profiles/properties resource to specify we want to create a profile property with the given

JSON payload. So to create our tweetNb integer property, we would call:

performXHRRequest('/profiles/properties', function (data) { console.log("Property type tweetNb successfully added!"); }, defaultErrorCallback, { itemId: 'tweetNb', itemType: 'propertyType', metadata: { id: 'tweetNb', name: 'tweetNb' }, tags: ['social'], target: 'profiles', type: 'integer' });

Here's the JSON definition for our tweetedFrom property type. Note the string value type and

the multivalued property set to true:

{ itemId: 'tweetedFrom', itemType: 'propertyType', metadata: { id: 'tweetedFrom',



name: 'tweetedFrom' }, tags: ['social'], target: 'profiles', type: 'string', multivalued: true }

The createdTypesIfNeeded function encapsulates all that logic, expecting an array of property

types returned by Unomi:

var createTypesIfNeeded = function (data) { var foundTweetNb, foundTweetedFrom = false; for (var i in data) { if (data[i].itemId === 'tweetNb') { foundTweetNb = true; } else if (data[i].itemId === 'tweetedFrom') { foundTweetedFrom = true; } if (foundTweetNb && foundTweetedFrom) { // we found the property types, so abort search and return return; } } // we haven't found the property types, so create them performXHRRequest('/profiles/properties', function (data) { console.log("Property type tweetNb successfully added!"); }, defaultErrorCallback, { itemId: 'tweetNb', itemType: 'propertyType', metadata: { id: 'tweetNb', name: 'tweetNb' }, tags: ['social'], target: 'profiles', type: 'integer' }); performXHRRequest('/profiles/properties', function (data) { console.log("Property type tweetedFrom successfully added!"); }, defaultErrorCallback, { itemId: 'tweetedFrom', itemType: 'propertyType',



metadata: { id: 'tweetedFrom', name: 'tweetedFrom' }, tags: ['social'], target: 'profiles', type: 'string', multivalued: true }); };

Our createTypesIfNeeded function needs to be called before we actually perform any profile

updates with these new property types since Unomi would create the properties with a

potentially wrong type. This is where async.js and its series function comes into play:

// call in sequence to make sure that property types are created // before we update the profile async.series([ // check first if we already have defined the property types // we're interested in and create them if needed function (callback) { performXHRRequest('/profiles/properties/tags/social', createTypesIfNeeded, defaultErrorCallback); callback(null, null); }, // then retrieve and update profile function (callback) { ... callback(null, null); } ]);

Only when we are sure the types are created can we attempt to update our user's profile. We first

identify the context server resource associated with the profile by using the profileId property

from the injected cxs object prefixed by the /profiles/ relative path. We can then retrieve the

associated profile, providing a callback to call upon success. The callback itself retrieves the

existing values for our tweetNb and tweetedFrom properties and updates them appropriately

using the globally available information from window.digitalData. Once this is done, another

call to the URI associated to our profile is performed, this time passing it our updated profile:

performXHRRequest('/profiles/' + cxs.profileId, function (profile) { var properties = profile.properties; var tweetNb = properties.tweetNb || 0; var tweetedFrom = properties.tweetedFrom || []; profile.properties.tweetNb = tweetNb + 1; var pageInfo = window.digitalData.page.pageInfo;



if (pageInfo) { var url = pageInfo.destinationURL; if (url) { tweetedFrom.push(url); profile.properties.tweetedFrom = tweetedFrom; } } // and update it with the new value for tweetNb performXHRRequest('/profiles', function (profile) { console.log("Profile successfully updated with tweetNB = " + profile.properties.tweetNb); console.log("Profile successfully updated with tweetedFrom = " + profile.properties.tweetedFrom); }, defaultErrorCallback, profile) });

As you can see, this solution is pretty involved though it has the advantage of being purely

implemented on the client, which might be your only option if you don't have access to the Unomi

server.

We will now examine another solution using a more elaborate context request associated with a

Unomi plugin.

4.3 USING A CONTEXT REQUEST AND A UNOMI PLUGIN

The code for this approach is located on the master branch of the our Digital Experience Manager

component (https://github.com/metacosm/unomi-tweet-button). This time, however, you will

also need another component, a Unomi plugin found at https://github.com/metacosm/unomi-

tweet-button-plugin/tree/with-mf-1_0_0 (with-mf-1_0_0 branch).

4.3.1 Digital Experience Manager component

The approach being different, our component, while globally similar, is greatly simplified in its

interaction with the context server. We define a simpler version of the context server request as

follows:

function contextRequest(successCallback, errorCallback, payload) { var data = JSON.stringify(payload); var url = window.digitalData.contextServerPublicUrl + '/context.json?sessionId=' + cxs.sessionId; var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest(); var isGet = data.length < 100; if (isGet) {



xhr.withCredentials = true; xhr.open("GET", url + "&payload=" + encodeURIComponent(data), true); } else if ("withCredentials" in xhr) { xhr.open("POST", url, true); xhr.withCredentials = true; } else if (typeof XDomainRequest != "undefined") { xhr = new XDomainRequest(); xhr.open("POST", url); } xhr.onreadystatechange = function () { if (xhr.readyState != 4) { return; } if (xhr.status == 200) { var response = xhr.responseText ? JSON.parse(xhr.responseText) : undefined; successCallback(response); } else { console.log("contextserver: " + xhr.status + " ERROR: " + xhr.statusText); if (errorCallback) { errorCallback(xhr); } } }; // Use text/plain to avoid CORS preflight xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "text/plain;charset=UTF-8"); if (isGet) { xhr.send(); } else { xhr.send(data); } }

There are a couple of things to note here, in comparison with the version we used in the other

approach:

• we didn't separate the CORS request creation because we will only need to make one

request

• we're not calling the REST API but rather a single URI:

window.digitalData.contextServerPublicUrl + '/context.json?sessionId='

+ cxs.sessionId. This URI requests context from Unomi, resulting in an updated cxs

object in the javascript global scope. The context server can reply to this request either by

returning a JSON-only object containing solely the context information as is the case when

the requested URI is context.json. However, if the client requests context.js then



useful functions to interact with Unomi are added to the cxs object in addition to the

context information as depicted above.

• we don't need to provide any authentication at all to interact with this part of Unomi since

we only have access to read-only data (as well as providing events as we shall see later on).

We therefore do not need to somehow retrieve the authentication information from

Marketing Factory.

The request to Unomi itself is also a lot simpler: one single request / response, no nested callbacks

or need to make sure that calls went through before being able to proceed with the next one:

var contextPayload = { source: { itemType: 'page', scope: window.digitalData.scope, itemId: window.digitalData.page.pageInfo.pageID, properties: window.digitalData.page }, events: [ { eventType: 'tweetEvent', scope: window.digitalData.scope, source: { itemType: 'page', scope: window.digitalData.scope, itemId: window.digitalData.page.pageInfo.pageID, properties: window.digitalData.page } } ], requiredProfileProperties: [ 'tweetNb', 'tweetedFrom' ] }; contextRequest(function (response) { console.log("Profile sucessfully updated with tweetNB = " + response.profileProperties.tweetNb + " and tweetedFrom = " + response.profileProperties.tweetedFrom); }, defaultErrorCallback, contextPayload);

The interesting part in that context request is, of course, the payload. This is where we provide

Unomi with contextual information as well as ask for data in return. This allows clients to specify

which type of information they are interested in getting from the context server as well as specify



incoming events or content filtering or property/segment overrides for personalization or

impersonation. This conditions what the context server will return with its response.

A context request payload needs to at least specify some information about the source of the

request in the form of an Item (meaning identifier, type and scope plus any additional properties

we might have to provide), via the source property of the payload. Of course the more

information can be provided about the source, the better.

A client wishing to perform content personalization might also specify filtering condition to be

evaluated by the context server so that it can tell the client whether the content associated with

the filter should be activated for this profile/session. This is accomplished by providing a list of

filter definitions to be evaluated by the context server via the filters field of the payload. If

provided, the evaluation results will be provided in the filteringResults field of the resulting

cxs object the context server will send.

It is also possible to clients wishing to perform user impersonation to specify properties or

segments to override the proper ones so as to emulate a specific profile, in which case the

overridden value will temporarily replace the proper values so that all rules will be evaluated with

these values instead of the proper ones. The segmentOverrides (array of segment identifiers),

profilePropertiesOverrides and sessionPropertiesOverrides (maps of property name

and associated object value) fields allow to provide such information. Providing such overrides

will, of course, impact content filtering results and segments matching for this specific request.

The clients can also specify which information to include in the response by setting the

requiresSegments property to true if segments the current profile matches should be returned

or provide an array of property identifiers for requiredProfileProperties or

requiredSessionProperties fields to ask the context server to return the values for the

specified profile or session properties, respectively. This information is provided by the

profileProperties, sessionProperties and profileSegments fields of the context server

response.

Additionally, the context server will also returns any tracked conditions associated with the

source of the context request. Upon evaluating the incoming request, the context server will

determine if there are any rules marked with the trackedCondition tag and which source



condition matches the source of the incoming request and return these tracked conditions to the

client. The client can use these tracked conditions to learn that the context server can react to

events matching the tracked condition and coming from that source. This is, in particular, used to

implement form mapping (a solution that allows clients to update user profiles based on values

provided when a form is submitted).

Finally, the client can specify any events triggered by the user actions, so that the context server

can process them, via the events field of the context request.

If no payload is specified, the context server will simply return the minimal information deemed

necessary for client applications to properly function: profile identifier, session identifier and any

tracked conditions that might exist for the source of the request.

Now that we've seen the structure of the request and what we can expect from the context

response, let's examine the request our component is doing:

var contextPayload = { source: { itemType: 'page', scope: window.digitalData.scope, itemId: window.digitalData.page.pageInfo.pageID, properties: window.digitalData.page }, events: [ { eventType: 'tweetEvent', scope: window.digitalData.scope, source: { itemType: 'page', scope: window.digitalData.scope, itemId: window.digitalData.page.pageInfo.pageID, properties: window.digitalData.page } } ], requiredProfileProperties: [ 'tweetNb', 'tweetedFrom' ] };

Our context request payload specifies the source of the request by leveraging the

window.digitalData information that Marketing Factory automatically injects in the javascript

global scope. We also specify that we want the context server to return the values of the tweetNb



and tweetedFrom profile properties in its response. Finally, we provide a custom event of type

tweetEvent with associated scope and source information, which matches the source of our

context request in this case.

The tweetEvent event type is not defined by default in Unomi. This is where our Unomi plugin

comes into play since we need to tell Unomi how to react when it encounters such events.

4.3.2 Unomi plugin overview

As previously mentioned, the Unomi plugin can be found at https://github.com/metacosm/unomi-

tweet-button-plugin/tree/with-mf-1_0_0 (with-mf-1_0_0 branch).

In order to react to tweetEvent events, we will define a new Unomi rule since this is exactly what

Unomi rules are supposed to do. Rules are guarded by conditions and if these conditions match,

the associated set of actions will be executed. In our case, we want our new rule

(incrementTweetNumber) to only react to tweetEvent events and we want it to perform the

profile update accordingly: create the property types for our custom properties if they don't exist

and update them. To do so, we will create a custom action (incrementTweetNumberAction) that

will be triggered any time our rule matches. An action is some custom code that is deployed in the

context server and can access the Unomi API to perform what it is that it needs to do.

4.3.3 Plugin architecture

Unomi is architected so that users can provide extensions in the form of plugins. Being built on top

of Apache Karaf, Unomi leverages OSGi to support plugins. A Unomi plugin is, thus, an OSGi

bundle specifying some specific metadata to tell Unomi the kind of entities it provides. A plugin

can provide the following entity types to extend Unomi, each with its associated definition (as a

JSON file), located in a specific spot within the META-INF/cxs/ directory of the bundle JAR file:

Entity type Description Location in cxs directory

Action Consequences triggered

when rules are matched

actions



Condition Expression destined at

performing tests on items

conditions

Persona Virtual profile with

determined properties to test

a site against

personas

Property Profile/session property

definition with associated

category

properties then profiles or sessions

subdirectory then <category name>

directory

Rule Conditional set of actions to

be performed in response to

events

rules

Scoring Set of conditions associated

with a value to assign to

profiles when matching

scorings

Segments Conditions against which

profiles are evaluated to

categorize them

segments

Tag Tags that can be used to

categorize items

tags then <category name>

Value Definition for values that can

be assigned to properties

(“primitive ” types)

values

Property merge

strategy

Strategy to resolve how to

merge properties when

performing profile merges

mergers



Blueprint is used to declare what the plugin provides and inject any required dependency. The

Blueprint file is located, as usual, at OSGI-INF/blueprint/blueprint.xml in the bundle JAR

file.

The plugin otherwise follows a regular maven project layout and must use the following parent in

its POM file, using the appropriate Unomi version:

<parent> <groupId>org.oasis-open.contextserver</groupId> <artifactId>context-server-plugins</artifactId> <version>...</version> </parent>

4.3.4 Rule definition

Let's look at how our custom (incrementTweetNumber) rule is defined:

{ "metadata": { "id": "smp:incrementTweetNumber", "name": "Increment tweet number", "description": "Increments the number of times a user has tweeted after they click on a tweet button" }, "raiseEventOnlyOnceForSession": false, "condition": { "type": "eventTypeCondition", "parameterValues": { "eventTypeId": "tweetEvent" } }, "actions": [ { "type": "incrementTweetNumberAction", "parameterValues": {} } ] }

Rules define a metadata section where we specify the rule name, identifier and description.

When rules trigger, a specific event is raised so that other parts of Unomi can react to it

accordingly. We can control how that event should be raised. Here we specify that the event

should be raised each time the rule triggers and not only once per session by setting

raiseEventOnlyOnceForSession to false, which is not strictly required since that is the



default. A similar setting (raiseEventOnlyOnceForProfile) can be used to specify that the

event should only be raised once per profile if needed.

We could also specify a priority for our rule in case it needs to be executed before other ones

when similar conditions match. This is accomplished using the priority property. We're using

the default priority here since we don't have other rules triggering on tweetEvents and don't

need any special ordering.

We then tell Unomi which condition should trigger the rule via the condition property. Here, we

specify that we want our rule to trigger on an eventTypeCondition condition. As seen earlier,

Unomi can be extended by adding new condition types that can enrich how matching or querying

is performed in Unomi. The condition type definition file specifies which parameters are expected

for our condition to be complete. In our case, we use the built-in event type condition that will

match if Unomi receives an event of the type specified in the condition's eventTypeId parameter

value: tweetEvent here.

Finally, we specify a list of actions that should be performed as consequences of the rule matching.

We only need one action of type incrementTweetNumberAction that doesn't require any

parameters.

4.3.5 Action definition

Let's now look at our custom incrementTweetNumberAction action type definition:

{ "id": "incrementTweetNumberAction", "actionExecutor": "incrementTweetNumber", "tags": [ "event" ], "parameters": [] }

We specify the identifier for the action type, a list of tags if needed: here we say that our action is

a consequence of events using the event tag. Our actions does not require any parameters so we

don't define any.

Finally, we provide a mysterious actionExecutor identifier: incrementTweetNumber.

4.3.6 Action executor definition

The action executor references the actual implementation of the action as defined in our

blueprint definition:

<blueprint xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.osgi.org/xmlns/blueprint/v1.0.0" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.osgi.org/xmlns/blueprint/v1.0.0 http://www.osgi.org/xmlns/blueprint/v1.0.0/blueprint.xsd"> <reference id="profileService" interface="org.oasis_open.contextserver.api.services.ProfileService"/>  <service id="incrementTweetNumberAction" auto-export="interfaces"> <service-properties> <entry key="actionExecutorId" value="incrementTweetNumber"/> </service-properties> <bean class="org.jahia.modules.unomi_tweet_button_plugin.actions.IncrementTweetNumberAction"> <property name="profileService" ref="profileService"/> </bean> </service> </blueprint>

In standard Blueprint fashion, we specify that we will need the profileService defined by

Unomi and then define a service of our own to be exported for Unomi to use. Our service specifies

one property: actionExecutorId which matches the identifier we specified in our action

definition. We then inject the profile service in our executor and we're done for the configuration

side of things!

4.3.7 Action executor implementation

Our action executor definition specifies that the bean providing the service is implemented in the

org.jahia.modules.unomi_tweet_button_plugin.actions.IncrementTweetNumberAction class. This

class implements the Unomi ActionExecutor interface which provides a single int

execute(Action action, Event event) method: the executor gets the action instance to

execute along with the event that triggered it, performs its work and return an integer status

corresponding to what happened as defined by public constants of the EventService interface of

Unomi: NO_CHANGE, SESSION_UPDATED or PROFILE_UPDATED.

Let's now look at the implementation of the method:



final Profile profile = event.getProfile(); Integer tweetNb = (Integer) profile.getProperty(TWEET_NB_PROPERTY); List<String> tweetedFrom = (List<String>) profile.getProperty(TWEETED_FROM_PROPERTY); if (tweetNb == null || tweetedFrom == null) { // create tweet number property type PropertyType propertyType = new PropertyType(new Metadata(event.getScope(), TWEET_NB_PROPERTY, TWEET_NB_PROPERTY, "Number of times a user tweeted")); propertyType.setValueTypeId("integer"); service.createPropertyType(propertyType); // create tweeted from property type propertyType = new PropertyType(new Metadata(event.getScope(), TWEETED_FROM_PROPERTY, TWEETED_FROM_PROPERTY, "The list of pages a user tweeted from")); propertyType.setValueTypeId("string"); propertyType.setMultivalued(true); service.createPropertyType(propertyType); tweetNb = 0; tweetedFrom = new ArrayList<>(); } profile.setProperty(TWEET_NB_PROPERTY, tweetNb + 1); final String sourceURL = extractSourceURL(event); if (sourceURL != null) { tweetedFrom.add(sourceURL); } profile.setProperty(TWEETED_FROM_PROPERTY, tweetedFrom); return EventService.PROFILE_UPDATED;

It is fairly straightforward: we retrieve the profile associated with the event that triggered the

rule and check whether it already has the properties we are interested in. If not, we create the

associated property types and initialize the property values.

Note that it is not an issue to attempt to create the same property type multiple times as Unomi

will not add a new property type if an identical type already exists.

Once this is done, we update our profile with the new property values based on the previous

values and the metadata extracted from the event. We then return that the profile was updated

as a result of our action and Unomi will properly save it for us when appropriate. That's it!



5 PERSONALIZATION API

5.1 INTRODUCTION

When integrating with some applications, you might want to use Marketing Factory’s

personalization functionalities without serving full-page HTML content generated by Jahia’s

Digital Experience Manager. For example, you might want to retrieve a list of images that are

stored in DX, and make sure that personalization or even test optimizations (such as A/B testing)

are applied to the elements of the list. In this case, the list of images is stored within DX’s CMS and

the personalization configuration is stored within the data that is managed by Marketing

Factory’s DX modules.

If we reduce the example from a list to a single variant element, this is actually very close to what

an ad-server might look like, where you want to retrieve a single image for a specific user profile.

This image will be delivered based on the criteria (such as segmentation, profile properties,

location) that have been setup for personalization. We are in this scenario only interested in this

(or these) resource, and not on a full-blown HTML page.

This is now possible in Marketing Factory through something called the content personalization

rendering API (aka personalization API).

5.2 CONTENT PERSONALIZATION RENDERING API

This API is primarily a content rendering API, and will not cover setting up or modifying existing

personalization or test optimization components. These must simply be setup using Marketing

Factory’s UI. This should be acceptable in most use cases, where it is acceptable to use a back-end

UI to edit/setup things and then use an API to access the result of the applied personalization.

This rendering API output JSON structures, much in a similar way that DX’s REST API does, but it

is a bit different in format and especially in functionality. It is also customizable since it uses DX

views to perform its rendering, making it possible to adjust the final result output using custom

modules (for example to customize the JSON output of a specific DX component).

Before going into the specific format of the JSON structures, let’s look at the URL format:

http://server:port/CONTEXT/PATH_TO_CONTENT.mf.json?QUERY_PARAMETERS



where:

- CONTEXT is the context in which the DX application is deployed (by default the ROOT

context is used in which case CONTEXT should be empty)

- PATH_TO_CONTENT should be the typical path to a content object (without any

extension), for example : /sites/digitall/home/texts

- QUERY_PARAMETERS are described in the following table.

Name Value

type

Default

value

Optional Description

hidden boolean false Yes If activated, the JSON output will contain

content properties marked as hidden

pretty boolean false Yes If activated, the JSON output will be indented

to make it easier to read. This is useful for

debugging but shouldn’t be used in

production

depth integer 1 Yes This parameter controls the depth of the tree

that is generated in the JSON output. Usually

a depth of 2 might be useful when rendering a

list of elements to avoid having to request the

elements in seperate HTTP requests.

wemSessionId string null Yes This parameter contains a valid Unomi

session ID (usually obtained from a previous

requset). If not specified, it will first look in

the server session for an object named

"wemSessionId" and if it could not be found,

a new sessionId will be generated by the

context server. In all cases, the Unomi session

ID will be part of the JSON result.



wemProfileId string null Yes This parameter contains a valid Unomi profile

ID. If not specified, the API will try to find the

value either in a cookie called "context-

profile-id", or in a server-side session object

named "wemProfileId" and setup by a

previous request.

wemPersonaId string null Yes This parameter contains a valid Unomi

Persona ID. If specified and valid, the persona

ID will be used to perform personalization

and test optimizations against the persona

instead of the current profile. The list of

personas may be retrieved using Unomi’s

Persona API.

Here is an example of such an URL :

http://localhost:8080/sites/digitall/home/texts.mf.json?hidden=true&pretty=true&depth=5

and here in an excerpt of the result (edited for compactness):

{

"path": "/sites/digitall/home/texts",

"parentPath": "/sites/digitall/home",

"identifier": "42e3db2a-6394-4f8d-9c0e-7d8ade34ca4d",

"index": 1,

"depth": "5",

"nodename": "texts",

"properties": {

"j:nodename": "texts",

"j:fullpath": "/sites/digitall/home/texts",



"jcr:createdBy": "root",

…

},

"types": {

"primaryNodeType": "jnt:contentList",

…

},

"title": "texts",

"classes": "selectable",

"hasChildren": true,

"childNodes": [

{

"path": "/sites/digitall/home/texts/rich-text",

"parentPath": "/sites/digitall/home/texts",

"identifier": "9769d43a-bc76-4681-90e1-633b863a9562",

"index": 1,

"depth": "4",

"nodename": "rich-text",

"properties": {

"j:nodename": "rich-text",

"j:fullpath": "/sites/digitall/home/texts/rich-text",


…

"text": "<p><strong>Bold Text<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<p> <\/p>"

},

"types": {

"primaryNodeType": "jnt:bigText",

…



},

"title": "Bold Text",


"hasChildren": false

},

{

"path": "/sites/digitall/home/texts/experience-rich-text-2/rich-text-1",

"parentPath": "/sites/digitall/home/texts/experience-rich-text-2",

"identifier": "5ab49763-18b3-4613-973f-c056bf8a3e8b",

"index": 1,

"depth": "3",

"nodename": "rich-text-1",

"properties": {

"j:nodename": "rich-text-1",

"j:fullpath": "/sites/digitall/home/texts/experience-rich-text-2/rich-text-1",


"wem:tab": "",

"wem:jsonFilter": "",

…

"text": "<p>fallback<\/p>"

},

"types": {


"mixinTypes": ["wemmix:editItem"],

"parentPrimaryNodeType": "wemnt:personalizedContent",

"parentMixinTypes": []

},



"title": "fallback",



},

{

"path": "/sites/digitall/home/texts/optimization-variant-a/variant-c",

"parentPath": "/sites/digitall/home/texts/optimization-variant-a",

"identifier": "3ea48051-6584-4493-9a21-edf72d98b495",

"index": 1,

"depth": "3",

"nodename": "variant-c",

"properties": {

"j:nodename": "variant-c",

"j:fullpath": "/sites/digitall/home/texts/optimization-variant-a/variant-c",

…

"text": "<p>variant-c<\/p>"

},

"types": {


"mixinTypes": ["wemmix:editItem"],

"parentPrimaryNodeType": "wemnt:optimizationTest",

"parentMixinTypes": []

},

"title": "variant-c",



}



],

"wemSessionId": "1fc2bcb8-99fe-47d1-8432-213ff495d6ff",

"wemProfileId": "0e4768b6-b129-45a7-a312-19544d112b7b",

"wemPersonaId": ""

}

In this example, there are multiple things to note:

- We are rendering a list of objects, so this is why we see a root object that has child nodes

- The first child is a regular rich text object with a text value.

- The second child is a personalized rich text object. As you can see it has a mixin type

"wemmix:editItem" and a parent node type "wemnt:personalizedContent" that indicates

we have actually rendered a variant of a personalized content list. Note that in this output

you cannot see the top personalization node (the "wemnt:personalizedContent"

personalization node) or the other variants, only the one that was rendered by Marketing

Factory for the current profile is part of the output. This way integrators don’t have to

understand all the inner workings of the personalization technology, they can just set it up

and get the expected result in JSON format.

- The third child is an optimization test (aka A/B testing node) node. Again a variant was

selected server-side and only the selected node is part of the output. The top optimization

test node and the other variants are not part of the output.

5.3 PROPER SESSION AND PROFILE TRACKING

Whenever interacting with Unomi’s API, Digital Experience Manager’s API or Marketing Factory’s

Personalization API, you must make sure that you are tracking and transfer any personalization

identifiers that you may have retrieved as part of a request’s response.

For example, if you perform a context retrieval call using Unomi’s API such as :

http://UNOMI_HOST:UNOMI_PORT/context.json?sessionId=MY_SESSION_ID

You will probably retrieve a profileId as a result of this context retrieval. If you provided a new

session ID in MY_SESSION_ID the session will be created in Unomi with this identifier and you will



need to use that for all sub-sequent calls to any APIs. For exemple, if you use the personalization

API to render content, you will need to do something like this:

http://localhost:8080/sites/digitall/home/texts.mf.json?hidden=true&pretty=true&depth

=5&wemSessionId=MY_SESSION_ID&wemProfileId=MY_PROFILE_ID

where MY_PROFILE_ID is the profile ID that was returned as a result of the request to the

context.json servlet.

It is also recommended that you use HTTP clients that can either handle cookies properly, or you

will have to manually manage the cookies for proper DX server session tracking (e.g. the

JSESSIONID cookie). Just as a general rule, check whether the HTTP client you will use supports

cookies out of the box, and if not, you will need to parse the returned cookies and send them back

when performing requests to both DX and Unomi. The following table gives you a list of the most

important cookies and their usage:

Name Origin Type Description

JSESSIONID DX string This cookie is used to track sessions server-side inside DX

context-

profile-id

Unomi string Used by Unomi to track the profile id. If a wemProfileId

parameter is specified it will override the cookie value but

it would be best that they always be in sync.

5.3.1 DX Login session integration

Marketing Factory also provides integration with DX’s login servlet. Again, in order for proper

session and profile tracking to happen, you must add a request parameter to the /cms/login

servlet when submitting a DX login. Here is an example

http://DX_HOST:DX_PORT/CONTEXT/cms/login?wemSessionId=MY_SESSION_ID

The body of the request is in typical multipart/form-data format (default type for HTTP POST

Form submissions) that contains the following fields:



Name Type Required Description

doLogin boolean Yes Must be set to "true" for the login to be performed

username string Yes The user unique name

password string Yes The user’s password

restMode boolean Yes Must be set to "true" for this use case

redirectActive boolean Yes Must be set to "false" for this use case

site string Yes The site against which to login, which is used mostly to

redirect back to the site after the login. In the case of

integration with Marketing Factory this is also used to

know in which site to retrieve the Context Server

configuration.

Please note that the required column relates to requirements for the integration with Marketing

Factory. In more general uses cases the requirements are different. Please refer to the Jahia REST

API documentation for more precise login servlet information.

5.4 TYPICAL PERSONALIZATION FLOWS

5.4.1 Introduction

In the following sections, we will describe typical personalization flows that application

developers might want to integrate. Also note that while the steps are quite detailed, most of

them happen automatically when using the personalization API. For example all the interactions

between DX and Unomi are handled by Marketing Factory. Other steps such as the login or the

session ID generation must be explicitely integrated into the custom applications. We mark the

implicit operations with a [I] and the explicit operations with a [E].



5.4.2 Conventions

“Get personalized JSON” or “Get test optimization JSON” are not really different requests, they

are both requests to the personalization API we have described previously

“DX” refers to the Marketing Factory DX modules, not the DX server by itself.

“Unomi” refers to the Apache Unomi Context Server.

5.4.3 Anonymous personalization

The following diagram describes the flow of a typical integration of personalization WITHOUT

authentication into a custom application:

Here is a more detail description of the steps:

1. [E] First the application generates a session ID. It may either be random, stored or

anything. It is not recommended to re-use session IDs, although there could be some cases

where it could be useful.

2. [E] We can now request the personalized JSON content, passing in the session ID that was

generated, as well as (optionally) any previously stored profile ID (from previous requests

for example) and an optional personaId if we want to render the result for a given persona

instead of the current profile.

3. [I] The Marketing Factory DX modules collect all the filters setup for each variant, as well

as the personalization configuration for each personalization content node.



4. [I] DX then sends a request to Unomi that contains the filters to execute against the

context that corresponds to the current session profile and persona).

5. [I] The Unomi executes the filters and returns the context that contains the session and

profile properties, along with the results of the filters execution.

6. [I] The DX server uses the filter results to filter the content and returns the JSON with the

filtered personalized content, as well as the sessionId, the profileId (warning it might

change in the case of profile merging) and the personaId if one was used.

5.4.4 Authenticated personalization

The following diagram describes the flow of a typical integration of personalization WITH

authentication into a custom application:

Here is a more detailed description of the steps:




2. [E] This first context request is required because only the context servlet in Apache Unomi

is allowed to create new sessions.



3. [I] The context is returned as a response of the request, and it contains a JSON structure

that contains the sessionId, the profileId, profile and session properties

4. [E] A login POST request is sent to DX with the required login credentials.

5. [I] Marketing Factory will detect the login and if it is successful, will generate a login event

that it sends to Unomi. This event contains all the user properties except the password, to

augment the existing Unomi profile. Also this may trigger profile merging operations inside

Unomi if multiple profiles are referencing the same profile (this typically happens when a

user logs in from different clients).

6. [I] DX returns the result of login. If the login was successful it simply returns "OK" as a text

response body.

7. [E] The app issues a second context request to get the updated profile and session

properties that were the result of the login request. This is necessary because the login

event was send from server-to-server and we therefore don’t get access to the updated

properties directly. Again the proper sessionId must be passed to the context request.

8. [I] The updated context is returned. Important note: the profile ID might have changed

because of merging. Make sure you read the profile ID and compare it to values you might

have and update them with the profile ID returned in this response.

9. [E] We can now request the personalized JSON content, passing in the session ID that was

generated, as well as (optionally) any previously stored profile ID (from previous requests

for example) and an optional personaId if we want to render the result for a given persona

instead of the current profile.

10. [I] The Marketing Factory DX modules collect all the filters setup for each variant, as well

as the personalization configuration for each personalization content node.

11. [I] DX then sends a request to Unomi that contains the filters to execute against the

context that corresponds to the current session profile and persona).

12. [I] The Unomi executes the filters and returns the context that contains the session and

profile properties, along with the results of the filters execution.

13. [I] The DX server returns the JSON with the personalized content, as well as the sessionId,

the profileId (warning it might change in the case of profile merging) and the personaId if

one was used.



5.4.5 Anonymous test optimization

The following diagram describes the flow of a typical integration of anonymous test optimization

into a custom application:

Here is a more detailed description of the steps:




2. [E] The application then sends a request for the JSON structure resulting of the test

optimization for the current profile, session and optional persona selected. Note that the

only required parameter is the session ID.

3. [I] DX then asks Unomi for the current context, because it uses a session property to store

the selected variant ID for the test optimization. If it is found, then we skip directly to step

5

4. [I] Unomi sends back the context corresponding to the request session, profile and

persona.

5. [I] If a variant was already selected, it is read from the session properties that were send in

the context and we then skip to step 8. If no variant was selected, DX selects a variant using

the configured test optimization setup.

6. [I] If no variant was selected, DX send a variant selection event to Unomi to notify it and

any rules related to variant selection are executed.



7. [I] If no variant was selected, DX sends a request to save the selected variant ID in the

session. Note: this still will probably disappear in future versions of Marketing Factory, and

directly integrated into a rule in the Unomi server.

8. [I] The JSON content corresponding to the test optimization for the current session, profile

and persona is returned, along with the identifiers for the session,profile and persona.



6 CONCLUSION

We have seen three different ways to interact with Marketing Factory, either purely from a client-

side perspective using the Unomi REST API but requiring authentication to do so, using a

combination of client-side code and Unomi plugin, or using the personalization API. If you are

building a web client, our recommended approach would be to use the second approach since it

makes for a much simpler client and avoid "leaking" the Unomi authentication details to Digital

Experience Manager modules. Moreover, the second approach also reduces the number of

roundtrip with the server and affords you greater control over what is accomplished.

However if you’re building a custom application (such as a desktop, mobile native application or

an integration with a complex external web site), the personalization API is also very useful since

it offers an easy yet powerful way to integration personalized content without needing a strong

integration with neither DX nor the Unomi server.

Either way, we barely scratched the power of what Marketing Factory can do and how it can be

extended to suit your needs.

marketing factory / unomi integration guide · marketing factory / unomi integration guide...

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