Add the Collectors Bundle to a Project

Introduction

Goal

Add the Collectors Bundle, which contains commonly used collectors, characteristics, and UI plugins, to a Bloomreach Experience Manager implementation project.

Background

The Relevance Module contains several collectors that are not bootstrapped by default. To make it easier to add these collectors to a project a Collectors Bundle has been created. The bundle is available as a jar file and contains commonly used collectors, characteristics, and UI plugins. This page describes what the bundle contains and how it can be used in a project.

Installation through Essentials

The Relevance Collectors Bundle can be installed into your project through Essentials. If you start developing a new project, ensure that you check Make use of Enterprise features, navigate to the Library tab in Essentials, locate the Relevance Collectors Bundle feature and click Install feature. Essentials then applies the steps documented for manual installation below to your project. Rebuild and restart your project, and configure the collectors as described below.

Manual Installation Instructions

Add the bundle as a dependency to the pom.xml file of your project’s cms module:

  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.onehippo.cms7</groupId>
    <artifactId>hippo-addon-targeting-bundle-collectors</artifactId>
  </dependency>

Some collectors in the bundle require additional configuration, as described in Configure Collectors below.

Contents of the Collectors Bundle

Provided Collectors

The Collectors Bundle provides configuration for the following collectors:

Provided Characteristics and Plugins

Visitor data for a collector is only updated if a corresponding characteristic has been configured for it. This is done to minimize the volume of visitor data and the number of back-end calls. The bundle provides characteristics (with corresponding UI plugins) for the following collectors:

These collectors will therefore update visitor data after adding the bundle to your project. These collectors also come with a characteristics plugin so that the visitor data can be used to set up target groups for personalization.

Characteristics and UI plugins are not provided for the following collectors:

These collectors will not update visitor data. If you want to use the collected data for personalization you will have to write your own characteristic and UI plugin.

Configure Collectors

The Collectors Bundle cannot provide all bootstrap configuration because some collectors require project specific configuration.

CookieCollector

The following optional property controls which cookies are collected:

The cookie name matching is case-sensitive, so ‘cartID’ will not match ‘CartID’.

If the cookie name contains dots, the collector will replace them by underscores (see section Dots in fields for more information) .

This collector only collects request data and does not update visitor data. As a result you cannot use this collector for personalization and a characteristic and UI plugin are not available.

RequestParamsCollector

This collector is bootstrapped by default via the Relevance Module. The values of those request parameters specified in the ‘params’ property will be saved as targeting request data.

The parameter name matching is case-sensitive so ‘Q’ will not match ‘q’.

If the parameter name contains dots then the collector replaces them by underscores.

This collector only collects request data and will not update visitor data. As a result you cannot use this collector for personalization and a characteristic and UI plugin are not available.