Rule and Rule Group Aliases

Rules are rarely created perfectly from the start and in many cases an element of tweaking is required to get the correct results and ensure the correct data is generated.

To get the most out of the Alterian CX tools we encourage our customers to follow a Rule rollout strategy incorporating Development, Test and finally Production Targets.

The Test and Development steps in the rollout process provide a sandbox where Rules can be setup, tweaked and tested with no risk to production.

This Development, Test, Production process requires that sister rules in different Targets are invoked as part of the rollout strategy.

Customers have had difficulty getting the right resources to change tags in appropriate time frames.

For example a tracking rule should start in Development where the intital Rule is pulled togather. Then the Rule is copied to the Test Target. The Test Rule tags should be added to the Website where the Categories and Conversions can be configured and the location values confirmed. (This is based on the assumption that no Test website exists)

Once the the rule has been running in Test for a while and the location fields, Categories and Conversions are being created correctly the Rule could be copied to Production and the Rule changed to Production running.

It’s these moves between Development, Test and Production that are made easier by the use of aliases.

You can now assign an Alias to a Rule or Rule Group in any Target.

So the alias may be

 demord\tracking rule

 So to call it we would use https://demo.dde.alterian.net//invoke/demo/tracking rule

 Note no target has been selected for the alias

 This can then be linked to a Rule or Rule group. For example

 https://demo.dde.alterian.net//invoke/test/demo/standard tracking rule

 Note this has the Test Target

Once the Rule and the Data generated buy the rule have been validated we can easily swap the alias to point to

 https://canary.dde.alterian.net//invoke/prod/demord/standard tracking rule

 Note we are now using the Production Target without any changes being made to the tagging on the site.

This will make it very easy for example to switch from Dev to Test to Production Rules.