Hard coded server call structure

[Cleve_Young]

For a particular server call we are manually constructing the image request string. Have a couple questions on the query parameters.

• "t" - this is supposed to be a UNIX or ISO-8601 format timestamp. The calls I normally see have a format of "31/4/2017 7:34:30 3 240". Can I use a format of "2017-05-31T11:54:32.090Z" instead? That is the result when I use the toISOString() JavaScript function, which is nice and simple.
• "g" - is this required? I haven't included it in my testing, and the data is showing up in reporting. It's not a problem to add, and I can limit it to 250 characters, but I'm trying to keep the code as simple and quick as possible so prefer not to include anything we don't really need.
• "vid" - is this required? We don't use a custom visitor id, so is this ok to not include? I can put in logic to check for the s_fid or s_vi cookies if needed. Does this affect any session or visitor identification at the Adobe server side, or do you use the cookies that get sent along with the server call for that purpose?
• "ce" - is this required?
• "AQE" - is this required?
• Any other required parameters?

[EricMatisoff]

Hey Cleve,

I only know some of the answers to your questions. This may or may not be helpful too:

Implementing Analytics using HTML image tags

and

Data Collection Query Parameters

t - I'm not sure that UNIX or ISO will work. I would test this significantly to confirm, but my gut is to stick with the prescribed format.

g - I don't believe this is required.

vid - I don't believe this is required. If it's not there, then the cookies you identified will be used.

ce - I don't believe this is required but I would set it to UTF-8 just in case.

AQE - It indicates the end of an image request, meaning the request was not truncated, which in my mind seems important. The tag may work fine without it, but I'd still include it.

Hope that helps!

[settytb1 · Accepted solution]

• 't' is local machine time, we only use it to pull the timezone from... not really needed. 
• 'g' is page url.  This is important as a missing url can be cause for a hit to be excluded.  If there is no pagename then a 'g' must exist.  When in doubt include it so the hit isn't excluded.
• vid this is a custom visitor Id.  Not required.
• ce is a charset, not very important unless doing multi-byte characters
• AQE is "adobe query end" marking the end of the query string... if you have and AQB then you need an AQE.  (beginning and end) otherwise we assume the string got truncated and drop the last item sent in the request to avoid partial strings. It isn't required if you are missing the AQB... but with an AQB must have an AQE.

This doc goes over the parameters:  Data Collection Query Parameters

I hope that helps,

Seth