Timeline Attribute - Record event based on Date

[TimWaijers]

When using a timeline attribute it is possible to update the timeline for two seperate time of events:

• Time of event Received
• Based on Date

I have a couple of questions regarding the "based on date" option:

• What are the use cases for this?
• Can I trigger an enrichment, rule or audience based on the passing of a date (eg. birthday)?
• Is it possible to store multiple attributes for the specific entry in a timeline event?
• Is it possible to remove specific timeline events based on the attributes of that event?

There is currently no information about this feature in the documentation (https://community.tealiumiq.com/t5/Universal-Data-Hub/Timeline-Attribute/ta-p/12093)

[mark_reddin · Accepted solution]

Hi @TimWaijers

Sorry for the delay.

• What are the use cases for this?

You won't always want to make the time of the entry based on when AudienceStream is processing the event.  For example, if you are passing omnichannel or other offline data to AudienceStream, then this omnichannel data might have been generated at some point in the past, and here it would probably be more useful to have a column in the data indicating the date at which the event occurred.

• Can I trigger an enrichment, rule or audience based on the passing of a date (eg. birthday)?

I'm not sure what you mean here.  If you want to treat some incoming data, e.g. "31-01-2018" as a date, it can be either an omnichannel attribute or from a data variable declared in iQ*.  There is presently no way to treat a UDH string directly as a date, hence the iQ method.  In AS, you can then transform this string into a date by either using it as the date for a timeline entry, or by setting a Visitor or Visit level date to it.  In all cases, you specify the date format, like this;

*For iQ attributes to show up in UDH, you need to have at least saved them in the active production version in iQ, and then reload UDH.  You don't have to publish iQ if you don't want to.  If you have a different version for production versus Dev, QA etc, I'd recommend you add them also to the Dev and QA versions so that they don't get lost when those versions are published to production.

Also note that although you need to declare the variable in iQ, you don't need to set it there, for example if you are using the Collect HTTP API.

• Is it possible to store multiple attributes for the specific entry in a timeline event?

Yes, see screenshot above.

• Is it possible to remove specific timeline events based on the attributes of that event?

No.  Once a timeline entry has been recorded, it will persist until it falls off the timeline because of the timeline expiry that you set.