DTM Rules
HI Jantzen,
Thank you for looking into this for me.
Below is path condition for ?actionUrl=/Member/Beneficiaries/Index&plancode=HS&trackid-1
Below is path condition for ?actionUrl=/Member/Beneficiaries/Index&plancode=HS
The rule seems to fire as expected for the above,
However, it doesn't work or ?actionUrl=/Member/Beneficiaries/Index&plancode=HS&trackid-1
It still sets the page name as per the other rule.
So wondering, what other methods I can try.
regards,
Winston
A condition using Path (include|exclude) is a substring ("contains") match. (sidenote: actually DTM performs a regex match against the value, even when you have Regex option turned off. Not relevant for your current values, but keep this in mind for future reference: you need to escape special regex chars if you want to use Path (include|exclude), even if you have regex option disabled!)
So, in your 1st rule, your condition is for path contains "actionUrl=/Member/Beneficiaries/Index&plancode=HS"
And in the 2nd rule, your condition is for path contains "actionUrl=/Member/Beneficiaries/Index&plancode=HS&trackid-1".
So if your URL includes that "&trackid=1" part, then your 1st rule won't trigger. But if it does not, then both rules trigger, and the 2nd one fired will win. And it sounds like in your case, rule #1 is executing after rule #2.
DTM doesn't officially have a way to enforce order of operations on a rule level, other than the 4 "Trigger at" types (top of page, bottom of page, dom ready, window load) . For multiple rules for a given "Trigger at" type, internally it just goes down the list. However, the order doesn't always reflect the order in the interface. (Once upon a time you could control the order by how you named the rules (e.g. "foo1" will execute before "foo2" because it sorts higher alphabetically) but this is no longer the case. I'm not entirely sure what ultimately determines list order now.. but point is, there is no official way to enforce order of operations of rules.)
Before getting into solving for this, I want to make an additional note that creating a condition like what you've done is not stable. The values you are evaluating are part of the query string (location.search). Well, query parameters can appear in any order. So for example, your (full) URL with the following query parameters:
actionUrl=/Member/Beneficiaries/Index&plancode=HS
is functionally identical to your (full) URL with the query parameters with swapped order:
plancode=HS&actionUrl=/Member/Beneficiaries/Index
The reason I bring this up is because your current rule conditions would fail on the latter scenario, which is almost certainly not what you want. So in practice, you should only use Path (includes|excludes) to look at the URL path (location.pathname) part of the URL, not the query string (location.search). (But actually, DTM's Path references (location.pathname+location.search), which is a bit misleading - and also can lead to false positives in some cases. So in practice, I create a data element of js object type that returns only location.pathname and use that instead, because there are almost no stable use cases for matching against location.pathname+location.search together)
To solve for all of this, instead of using Path criteria, you should use Parameter criteria to look for individual query params. This way it won't matter which order they appear in the URL. Also, this will help weed out potential false positives since the Parameter criteria type specifically parses the query string component of the URL. This will solve for your plancode and actionUrl query parameters, but not for trackid-1.
DTM does not have a built-in way to say "this query parameter does not exist" (what you want for your first rule). Nor does it have a way to say "This query parameter is found but it does not have a value" (what you want for your second rule). The only solution for this part is to write your own javascript code, using Data > Custom criteria.
For your 1st rule, you want it to trigger if trackid-1 does not exist at all, so you can do this:
return !location.search.match(/[?&]trackid-1(=[^&#]*)?([&#]|$)/);
For your 2nd rule, you want it to trigger if it exists (even if it has no value, so you can do this:
return location.search.match(/[?&]trackid-1(=[^&#]*)?([&#]|$)/);
Note: Both regexes are the same. They return a value if trackid-1 is found in location.search, regardless of position or if it has a value. The difference between the 1st and 2nd rule code is in the 1st rule's code, there is a ! in front of location , which negates the match's returned value. So on the first rule, if it is found you want to return false, and in the 2nd rule you want it to return true.
So, putting it all together, both of your rules should have a total of 3 conditions and look almost exactly alike, except for one "!" in the custom code:
Page Load Rule #1 to match for
?actionUrl=/Member/Beneficiaries/Index&plancode=HS
Where URL Parameter actionUrl equals "/Member/Beneficiaries/Index"
AND URL Parameter where plancode equals "HS"
AND where URL Parameter trackid-1 does not exist
Page Load Rule #2 to match for ?actionUrl=/Member/Beneficiaries/Index&plancode=HS&trackid-1
Where URL Parameter actionUrl equals "/Member/Beneficiaries/Index"
AND URL Parameter where plancode equals "HS"
AND where URL Parameter trackid-1 exists
