Configuring an offer for Digital Recommendations integration

Before your web page can call Digital Analytics Digital Recommendations to retrieve a recommended product, you must first configure the IBM® Interact offer with the necessary information to pass to Digital Recommendations.

To set up an offer to link to Digital Recommendations, make sure the following conditions are in place first:

Make sure that your Interact runtime server is set up and running correctly.

Ensure that the runtime server can establish a connection with the Digital Recommendations server, including making sure that your firewall does not prevent the outgoing establishment of a standard web connection (port 80).

To set up an offer for integration with Digital Recommendations, perform the following steps.

Create or edit an offer for Interact.

For information on creating and modifying offers, see the IBM® Interact User's Guide, and the IBM® Campaign documentation.

In addition to the other settings in the offer, make sure that the offer includes the following offer attributes:

The URL (uniform resource locator) that links to the image for the offer.

The URL that links to the landing page for the offer.

An Digital Recommendations category ID associated with this offer.

You can retrieve the category ID manually from your Digital Recommendations configuration. Interact cannot retrieve category ID values directly.

In the demonstration web application included with your Interact installation, these offer attributes are called ImageURL, ClickThruURL, and CategoryID. The names can be any that are meaningful to you, as long as your web application matches the values that the offer is expecting.

For example, you might define an offer called "10PercentOff" that contains these attributes, where the Category ID (as retrieved from your Digital Recommendations configuration) is PROD1161127, the URL of the offer click-through is http://www.example.com/success, and the URL of the image to display for the offer is http://localhost:7001/sampleIO/img/10PercentOffer.jpg (a URL that is, in this case, local to the Interact runtime server).

Define the treatment rules for an interactive channel to include this offer, and deploy the interactive channel as usual.

The offer is now defined with the information required for Digital Recommendations integration. The remaining work to allow Digital Recommendations to provide product recommendations to Interact is accomplished by configuring your web pages to make the appropriate API calls.

When you configure your web application to serve the integrated page to visitors, make sure that the following files are included in the WEB-INF/lib directory:

Interact_Home/lib/interact_client.jar, required to handle calls from your web page to the Interact API.

Interact_Home/lib/JSON4J_Apache.jar, required to handle the data returned from the call to the Digital Recommendations REST API, which returns JSON-formatted data.

See Using the Integration Sample Project for more information on how to serve the offers to your customers.