Directly selecting an item for promotion using SmartTarget

Question

I'm following the SmartTarget documentation here (login needed) as I would like to select a published component as the content for a given promotion.

It's a little confusing:

1. The interface shows to enter them in the format 7707,7719 etc (assuming 7707 is really component tcm:2-7707 etc).
2. The documentation wants a 'secondid' based on the id/template id combo eg: tcm_9-11-1104-16_tcm_9-919-32

I've used the preview area of SmartTarget to get my secondid values, and I've entered them into the promotion and I'm not getting any results. I've checked the promo triggers by looking in a specific location.

I've tried combinations of values:

• With tcm id (with / without colon, hypen, type etc)
• Without tcm id (with / without colon, hypen, type etc)
• Secondids
• Both / all at the same time

I'm starting to think it's a bug in the system, or there is something terribly wrong with me!

I'm using ST 2011 SP 3, Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

From your question I understand that you want to set up a promotion which uses a list of hand picked items to return for your promotion.

In the field you need to enter a comma separated list of secondid values, in the tcm_9-1104-16_tcm_9-919-32 format. This format effectively is a reference to a specific component presentation. The fist part of the id is the component id, the second part of the id is the compontent template id.

The Business Manager GUI suggest to enter a list of id's like 7707,7719 since you could have any data as promotional items in the system. The component presentations ids stored in the secondid field are what you are looking for and they happen to be a bit longer than the 7707 example.

In the Business Manager preview you can enable the triggers used by your promotion so you can test what the promotion returns.

Update: Also see the documentation Defining promotion action (login required). Apparently you can also choose to enter a separated list.

If you select Handpicked list, enter item IDs, the value of an item's secondid attribute. You can find out the secondid by opening the Preview Page. The format of a content item's secondid is, for example, tcm_9-1104-16_tcm_9-919-32. Add each content item ID on a separate line.