Step-based objects

In Experience Analytics, you can create two types of objects to monitor events that are captured from a client framework and passed as messages to Experience Analytics.

  • Step attributes are hit attributes that acquire its data from a step. Step attributes are specified in a slightly different manner but complete an identical function.
  • Step-based events are standard Experience Analytics events that are configured to fire on one of the steps triggers. As conditions, they can use any standard type of Experience Analytics condition, and also step attributes.

Step trigger types

To support step-based eventing, the Event Manager provides two trigger types:

  • Every Step: Event is evaluated with other events in each step.
  • After Every Step: Event is evaluated after every step is evaluated.
    Note: This trigger is rarely used.

In the previous example, any event triggered to fire on Every Step is checked for each combination of JSON message and environmental data. In the previous example, any Every Step event is checked for the load, unload, exception, and other data message.

Note: Step attributes are permitted to reference objects from the parent hit. As a result, you can reference hit attributes in step events, but not vice versa.

In the event definition, the trigger can be selected from the Evaluate drop-down:

Available triggers are displayed in the order of evaluation. For a particular hit with underlying steps, each Every Hit event is evaluated first, followed by each Every Step event and After Every Step event. Then, the After Every Hit events are evaluated.

Note: The events that fire on each trigger determine the availability of data. An event can use data from any event that fired before the current event. In a multi-hit session, the After Every Hit trigger fire on the previous hit before the events configured to fire on Every Hit from the next hit. The same applies to step-based triggers.

The order of firing is more accurately displayed as a nested structure:


* First Hit of Session
    * Every Hit
        * Every Step
        * After Every Step
    * After Every Hit
    * Last Hit
* End of Session