Best way to store timestamp HH:MM:SS into eVar | Community
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Level 3
April 13, 2023
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Best way to store timestamp HH:MM:SS into eVar

  • April 13, 2023
  • 1 reply
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Best way to store timestamp HH:MM:SS into eVar by using plugin or App measurement. 

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Best answer by Jennifer_Dungan

I don't know if there is a "best practice" per se... this is a pretty niche requirement... 

Adobe Workspaces provide breakdowns to a minute granularity already... Data Warehouse exports only support down to hourly data.

 

For most companies, if they need down to the second reporting, then they generally set up Raw Data feeds (which contain the full and complete timestamp (day, hour, minute, second, millisecond) and process the data (as close as possible to Adobe) and use their own internal data lake).

 

 

That said, if you don't want to go that route, and instead set up custom tracking, how you store the data will really depend on how you plan to use it.

 

Key items to keep in mind:

  • How do you want it to display - visually appealing / readable to your users is important 
  • Are you going to use Classifications to process the data, and make segments from those classifications? If so, you want values that you can easily parse with Regex
  • Any data collected manually like this won't line up with Adobe's timestamp... especially the seconds.... there will always be minor variations (since system time variance is "acceptable" is a 5 min tolerance), and then you have people that don't use auto-sync time that could have anything set on their device.....  Adobe tracking uses the Adobe server to set the timestamp, so it's one consistent source of truth

1 reply

Level 3
June 6, 2024

Hi @vanibhemarasetty ,
Just checked the above link you shared and also got the value via getTimeParting plugin in Web SDK implementation.
But I wanted to know if we can capture the timestamp value as - is (as shown in the ss below) in an eVar, is that possible ?

Meanwhile, I checked few documents it says "xdm.timestamp" is the path, but it is not retrieving any value, any thoughts if we need to add some other code here to pick the timestamp value.

Secondly, I also tried mapping the "xdm.timestamp" to an eVar in the DataStreams mapping itself,  but no luck!

Please share your thoughts on the above concern!!

Thanks

 

 

Jennifer_Dungan
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
June 6, 2024

I store timestamp data like that in one of my eVars, but in Adobe Analytics its still stored as text. Which means I cannot process it as a timestamp.  It can be used as a timestamp when I use report builder, and use Excel to convert it into a usable timestamp, or by our Data Team who can convert it to a timestamp from the Raw Data Feeds and store it in our data lake as a timestamp.

 

Maybe you could help share your use case so we can offer some additional insights?

 

In my case, the timestamp is actually the publishing time of our articles, but I use a secondary way to store the year/month and day info (for segment creation so that I can pull back content publish with a specific span)