Can the Tealium Generic Tag use HTTP POST instead of GET?

[steve_crawford]

Can the Tealium Generic Tag use HTTP POST instead of GET? If not is there any way to create a custom POST based tag?

[craig_rouse]

Hi Steve, This is not currently supported. My initial thoughts are that a POST will not be possible due to cross-domain script origin protection in the browser (as Tealium is hosted on a domain that is considered 3rd party to your site, the browser will deny Tealium from creating any HTTP POST requests). Perhaps you can share information more about your specific use case? Someone else might have another idea - this is just my initial thought on the matter. Craig.

[steve_crawford]

Thanks for the response Craig, Our use case is that we are wanting to make sure that we do not reach the 2083 character limit in IE with GET requests. We will have some pretty large custom tags which could come close to that limit. We are actually going to be hosting that javascript files on our server. We are using Tealium to generate and manage the scripts for us. So I'm not sure if we will still run into any issues with cross site scripting. -Steve

[craig_rouse]

To be clear, are you going to be self-hosting Tealium? If so, and our utag.js is hosted on the same domain as your site, then you could in theory create a post request, but I would not recommend it. When you say "large custom tags" are you talking about the JavaScript files themselves? The 2083 character limit only applies to the actual URL of a file, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the file itself. Furthermore, this knowledge base article suggests that the limit applies to both POST and GET requests, so using POST requests to circumvent the issue probably wouldn't work: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427 There are rarely going to be occasions when you hit the character limit, and in the case of Adobe SiteCatalyst which uses the query string very heavily, there is a built-in variable compression algorithm to avoid this problem. Hope this helps! Craig.

[steve_crawford]

Yes, we will be self hosting Tealium. By large custom tags I'm referring to a tag we are creating which points to our web beacon (i.e. It's not a SiteCatalyst or GA tag). If we send all of the data as query strings, I think it could easily reach the 2083 character limit for the URL. By using POST, we could transmit those query strings instead as header values. So even if we had 2083+ characters of name/value pairs, the limit would not affect us.

[craig_rouse]

That makes sense. Since this is not "out of the box" functionality, and is a very special use case, I would recommend speaking with your account manager to discuss the issue further. If you're self hosting, you could certainly write some custom code in a JavaScript extension that would do the job. Your account manager can point you in the right direction if you need some support with this. Craig.

[steve_crawford]

Okay. Thanks Craig.