Mike, I wish I understood what the Direct Rules were for. I can't find any documentation on it, or sufficient explanation of when or why it should be used. Can you be my sensei? I would love to learn what you know.
The most important problem I'm facing from DTM is that I want to trigger events *not* by what the user does (clicks, hovers, etc), but rather by what my site is showing the user. So much of the experience changes dynamically on the pages that the URL is no good to me. I've been using a lot of Element Exists rules, but they don't fire as reliably as I need them to, and so I've been resorting to my own set of jQuery listeners.
So what I'm really looking for is a way to send something to the page that will trigger my DTM events. I can tell my developers to populate data layer variables in a certain scenario, but that doesn't necessarily trigger anything on DTM's side, so the data just sits there unsent.
Mike, Thank you so much for pointing me to this. Let me tell you what kind of trouble you just caused: I just completed the most hectic week of my life, because we switched 180 degrees from an Event-Based Rule implementation to a Direct Call Rule implementation. It was *absolutely* the right thing to do, and I'm so grateful for you turning me onto it.
I even wrote a blog post about that switch, and why I'll never go back to Event-Based rules in any TMS. There's a shout-out to you in it (I didn't call you out by name, but I will if you want).
http://trackingfirst.com/adobe-dtm-case-direct-rule-calls/
