Implementing Event Forwarding with AEP Web SDK

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I have divided the implementation into 6 steps.

While the first three steps are very well explained on our official documentation. I would concentrate from step 4 onwards

These are the documentation links for the first three steps

Create Schema

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/platform-learn/tutorials/schemas/create-schemas.html?lang=en

Create Datastream

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-platform/edge/datastreams/overview.html?lang=en

One additional step is that along with other services, like Adobe analytics, I would need to select Even forwarding as well. For example, I want to send data to non-adobe solutions through event forwarding as well along with Adobe Analytics

Install Web SDK Extension

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/platform-learn/implement-web-sdk/tags-configuration/install-...

Create Even Forwarding Property

If your org is provisioned for Event Forwarding, you should be able to see the option "Event Forwarding" in Launch UI

Click on Event Forwarding -- Create Property -- Once created you would see a new icon as shown in the below snippet

Unlike properties in Tags, we would generally see a desktop or mobile icon based on whether it is web or mobile property, This Icon of Edge would indicate that it is an event forwarding properties

Create Rules/Data elements

The rules would indicate when and where the data should go and the data elements would indicate what are the data points that I wish to send 

One interesting fact is that, unlike our traditional data elements where we could see tons of different options under the drop-down, in this, we have three options and any type of use case should fit in these three

Referencing data from Platform Edge Network

To reference data from Platform Edge Network, you must create a data element that provides a valid path to that data. When creating the data element in the UI, select Core for the extension and Path for the type.

The Path value for the data element must follow the pattern arc.event.{ELEMENT} (for example: arc.event.xdm.web.webPageDetails.URL). This path must be specified correctly in order for data to be sent

Create Rule

Now I would need to create a rule to send the data to Non-adobe solution, Our extensions catalog might be limited right now, with limited destinations, but our product team has been actively working on including more extensions

One of the extensions that I have installed is the Adobe Cloud Connector along with Core

For testing purposes, I have used https://webhook.site/ to send the data to

I have created a rule to send the data to the above endpoint and my rule UI would look like this

Action Type: Make Fetch Call 

Request Method: GET

This would look something like Post man where you send APIs to different end points

Validation:

Now that I have implemented everything, the most interesting part is the validation part. To validate my implementation, Adobe Expereince Platform Debugger chrome extension is the best, this extension is designed to handle both client-side and server-side implementations

I have implemented it on our demo website https://luma.enablementadobe.com

Go to the Tools section of the debugger -- Logs -- Edge -- Sign in to your IMS org, When the page loads 

I could see these logs which indicate the how the event forwarding rules are working 

If you are sending the data to Google Analytics, you should be able to see this data in your destination

I could see these requests reflected in https://webhook.site/  UI. An interesting fact is that the data sent to the end point on real-time

Note: Edge servers do not save the data if the implementation is incorrect and you want the Edge server to resend the data to the endpoint again which you have missed, well that is not possible.

Well, that comes to the end of this post on implementing and validating of event forwarding

Hope that this article would be helpful

Happy Learning!