Adding a Date option to Session Footprint

Question

We have the following example SmartTarget campaigns set up against dates.

Trigger:

• "Date is between 01/12/2012 and 31/12/2012"
• "Date is between 01/01/2013 and 03/02/2013"

I'd like to add an appropriate date selection as a Footprint option in Experience Manager. Following the documentation (requires login), I have the following.

Model

%TRIDION_HOME%\web\WebUI\Models\SiteEdit\Configuration\SiteEditModel.config has:

<footprint ID="date" claimUri="taf:claim:date" ><!-- not sure what claim is needed -->
    <title>
        <value lang="1033">Date</value>
    </title>
    <description>
        <value>Select date.</value>
    </description>
    <settings>
        <isMandatory>true</isMandatory>
    </settings>
    <values>
        <value text="2012-11-01T00:00:00" default="true">
        </value>
    </values>                                           
</footprint>

Editor

%TRIDION_HOME%\web\WebUI\Editors\SiteEdit\Configuration\SiteEditEditor.config has:

<footprint ID="date" controlID="FootprintDate" Icon="calendar"/>

Icons

I also added these icons to:

%TRIDION_HOME%\web\WebUI\Editors\SiteEdit\Themes\Carbon\Images

• footprint.calendar.16x16.png
• footprint.calendar.24x24.png
• footprint.calendar.32x32.png

Question

What's the right claimUri to target the matching SmartTarget campaign dates? The documentation mentions taf:claim:foo but it's not really an example for SmartTarget.

Do I have to restart anything to have the footprint option show?

Update: Clearing browser cache made the option visible. I just need to research the right claim.

Answer 1

1. You need to use fh:user:date as the claim uri.
2. You also need with Tridion 2013 to enable claim forwarding for that claim. You can do this in the cd_ambient_conf.xml by adding <Claim Uri="fh:user:date"/> within the GloballyAcceptedClaims element.

However, this is not enough, because the date format generated by the FootprintDate control is not recognized by Fredhopper. Here is the result in the FH query: &fh_user_date=2013-12-08T00%3A00%3A00

Using a custom ASP.Net User Control I am able to set this claim and get a promotion triggered correctly. You can actually check the fh_user_date URL parameter value as part of the FH Query in the cd_core_log file, when logging is set in DEBUG mode. A fh query appears as follow in the log:

DEBUG Query - Executing query: fh_location=

So you can either search for "fh_location" or "fh_user_date" directly to find the claim value that you are working with. For instance fh_user_date=20131207 works.

I looked at the Fredhopper Learning Center (login required) and the format of the fh_user_date parameter is simply YYYYMMDD.

To get to the bottom of this, we may need to create a custom Footprint date control which would output that format, or modify the existing FootprintDate control if that is acceptable.

Answer 2

You could use the fh_user_date as Philippe suggests, or simply your own trigger of type date. I thought fh_user_date was always evaluated based on the current time, but apparently you can override it now. I haven't tried it myself.

Any claims that are defined as triggers in Fredhopper and are of the type Date (in Java) or DateTime (in .NET) will be converted by SmartTarget to the Fredhopper format before being added to the query.

I'm not certain if the date footprint in XPM ends up as a Date object or just a String, but if it's the latter I can see why it wouldn't work. In such a case, I would recommend creating a cartridge which transform the string claim value into a java.utils.Date object. It will then be picked up by SmartTarget and put into the query automatically (provided that you have it set up as a trigger of course).

Of course if the XPM footprint ends up as a Date already, your problem lies elsewhere - most likely in the smarttarget_cartridge not being configured correctly.

Update: I've confirmed that date footprints end up as a string and not a Date object in the claim store.