Event Specifications

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Event specifications are a way to organize and validate the quality of incoming data and they represent your data layer in EventStream. As mentioned earlier, events processed by EventStream are identified by the  tealium_event attribute. The value of this attribute represents the name of the event and its associated specification. The specification also indicates which event attributes are required in the event.

How It Works

Event specifications are used to identify and standardize the events you want to collect in your EventStream implementation.

Here's how it works:

• Event Name and Attributes
  An event specification has a name and a list of required/optional attributes. The name is the value set in the tealium_event attribute. For example, an event that tracks when a user performs a search would be represented by  tealium_event="search" and would have required attributes search_term and search_results containing the searched term and the number of results returned respectively.
  
• Marketplace or Custom Specs
  EventStream comes with a marketplace of predefined event specifications for the most commonly tracked events, such as "cart_add", "screen_view", "search", etc. You can add these specifications to your account or create custom ones.
• Associate with Data Sources
  Once you've added specifications, they can be associated to data sources. Specs are platform neutral so a standard event such as "search" would be implemented consistently in each platform. At the same time, not all specifications will apply to every type of data source. From the Data Sources area you associate active specifications to the data sources that implement them.
• Get Code/Installation Guide
  When specifications are associated to a data source, the installation guide will automatically include code samples for each one. 
• Data Validation
  The Live Events screen will now reflect the quality of your data based on which events match existing specifications and if they contain the required attributes.

Example event specification:

{
    tealium_event  : "search",
    search_keyword : "STRING", // the searched term
    search_results : NUMBER    // number of results
}

Click Next to see how to add an event specification.

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