Passing custom parameters to an e-Marketing Spot Atom feed

If the default parameters supported for Web service feed URLs do not meet your needs, you can define custom parameters. To do so, you must extend the Java class that handles Atom feeds for the MarketingSpotData noun. By customizing the business logic in the class, you can pass custom parameter values directly to the marketing services.

Before you begin

For a list of default parameters supported for Web service feed URLs, see:

URL structure for Web service feeds

To understand the framework that supports Web service feeds, see:

Overview of the RESTful Web service framework for feeds

About this task

By default, e-Marketing Spot feed URLs support a set of parameters that allow you to control the behavior of the Atom feed. For example, you can specify the language of the feed content and the maximum number of products to display in the feed. The Java class that handles these parameters ignores any unsupported parameters passed on the URL, to avoid unexpected behavior or malicious parameters. To support any additional parameters, you must do the customization tasks described in this section.

Example

You want to customize an e-Marketing Spot feed so that it displays different content depending on a certain parameter and value in the URL. The parameter, loyaltyId, indicates the customer's loyalty program level. After the customization is in place, you want to create personalized Web activities to recommend products to customers based on their loyalty program level. For example:


Loyalty program level	Loyalty program values	Recommended product
Gold (Big Spender)	Start with `100-`	Executive Six-Drawer Desk
Silver (Bargain Hunter)	Start with `200-`	Craft Table
Not a loyalty member	No value	Student's Desk

To support this custom parameter, you must extend the MarketingSpotData Java class that handles Atom feeds for e-Marketing Spots so that the class passes the loyaltyId URL parameter to the marketing services. The Web activity can then display the correct recommended product based on the value of the loyaltyId URL parameter.