How to Get Notified of Changes to the Tealium iQ Publish Engine

[TealiumJustin]

The publish engine is a back-end component of the iQ Tag Management infrastructure that generates the JavaScript code files that are uploaded to the CDN and deployed to your site. It does this by translating each component of your iQ profile configuration into its corresponding JavaScript code, then saving this code into the files on the CDN. This process occurs each time a publish occurs within the iQ Tag Management user interface.

Publish Engine Component Types

The publish engine distinguishes the components of an iQ profile configuration into three types:

• Native components
• Configured components
• Templated components.

This distinction is important in understanding how changes in your profile will affect the published files.

Native Components

Native components represent the underlying logic and structure of built-in elements of the iQ interface. The inner workings of these components are housed within the publish engine and can be expected to be consistent between each publish action.

List of native components:

• Condition Operators (equals, greater than, starts with, contains, etc.)
• Condition Logic (IF, AND, OR)
• Extension Scope and Execution (All Tags, DOM Ready, After Load Rules, etc.)
• Extension Logic (lookup tables, persist data, set data values, etc.)
• Consent Manager

For example, you can expect that the publish engine will consistently generate the same code for the native components of this load rule:

 IF order_total IS GREATER THAN 100

When we release changes to native components it affects all accounts that are using those components. For this reason, native components are rarely changed and when they are it will be accompanied with a detailed advanced notice.

Configured Components

Configured components represent most of, but not all, the configuration you apply within your iQ profile. Anytime you enter text into a form field, you are modifying configured components.

List of configured components:

• Data Layer Variable Names
• Load Rule Comparison Values
• Tag Configuration Values
• Tag Data Mappings
• Extension Values

Using the previous example of the load rule, the configured components are the variable name "order_total" and the value "100". If you change these components, the resulting published code will also be changed. The publish engine simply publishes the values that are entered in the configuration.

Configured components change all the time. This is the primary activity occurring within your account.

Templated Components

Templated components originate from a back-end source, but once they are saved into your profile, they will only change if you edit them directly. Tags are the primary templated components. When a tag is added to your profile, a copy of the master tag template for that vendor is saved to your profile. The base code generated by the publish engine for that tag will remain unchanged unless you modify it directly. When a newer version of that vendor tag is released in the tag marketplace, the local copy of the tag in your profile will not be updated automatically.

The benefit of templated components is that newer versions of tags can continually be released without impacting existing deployments of those tags.  Templates components can only be changed directly from within your account.

Notification of Changes

We frequently release updates to iQ Tag Management that affect templated components. These updates are posted in a monthly announcement named "Release Notes - <Month> <Year>" in the Tealium Learning Community (TLC). On rare occasions we release an update to a native component. When this occurs we will post a special announcement named "Publish Engine Release Notes". This post will contain important information for all users to consider related to their iQ accounts.

To subscribe to release notes notifications:

1. Log into TLC and visit the Announcements forum to subscribe to this forum.
2. At the top of the list of posts, click Follow.

You will now receive an email notification whenever a new announcement is posted. Upon receiving a notice about changes to the publish engine, and determining that the changes affect your account, follow the standard publish and test procedure. It might be a good idea to put a hold on publishing your profile to the Prod environment until you have verified the publish engine changes in a QA or Dev.

Additional Reading

• Saving and Publishing
• Publish Workflow Management