New features and changes in version 9.0.0

Interact behavioral event handling

Interact can now personalize offers that are based on patterns of visitor activity, referred to as event patterns. Using event patterns (also referred to as "behavior triggers"), you can test whether an event or a collection of events is occurring during an interaction and, if the specified pattern of event occurrences is met, to trigger one or more actions in response.

For example, on a website, a pattern of events might include any combination of pages that are visited (including the number of times a page is visited), documents that are downloaded, media that are viewed, and search terms that are used. As another example, in a call center, events such as the reason for the interaction, or the actual service request that is initiated during the interaction (such as address changes or product inquiries) might be used to identify an event pattern that could trigger an action. All of these events, when they are taken together, identify a certain pattern of behavior, and these event patterns can now trigger actions in Interact session. The triggered actions can also include an External Callout.

The implementation of event patterns also includes a feature that is called trigger events. A trigger event is an event that is triggered by another event or event pattern. Another way to say that is that one event can, as its action, trigger another event. The trigger event can be an event that is already defined (on the Events tab within Interact), or an event that is recognized as part of a pattern and treated as an event with the specified action. For example, you might use the triggered event feature in a case where the KitchenAppliancePageVisited event occurs. You might decide that one of the actions that are triggered by that event is that the KitchenRenovationsPageVisited event also occurs, or other events, as well as their subsequent actions.

You can use both standard and trigger events in definitions of event patterns. After you create event patterns, they become available for use in interactive flowcharts.

To see the changes that are implemented to support event patterns, see the Events tab for an interactive channel.

(RTC616, RTC716, RTC717, RTC718, RTC719)

Randomizing offer presentation

In prior releases of Interact, when multiple offers in the same rule group on the Strategy tab have the same score, Interact returns the offer with the lowest offer ID. With this release, Interact randomizes among the offers that have equal scores, making it less likely that a visitor sees the same offer across multiple interactions. 

Randomizing offer presentation is enabled by default, but is controlled by the Interact | offerserving | offerTieBreakMethod configuration property on the Interact runtime server. (RTC621)

REST API support

Prior releases of Interact provide access to its application programming interface (API) through SOAP and Java™ Serialization over HTTP. With this release, Interact supports an additional industry-standard messaging approach called REST (Representational State Transfer). The RESTful (conforming to REST constraints) implementation that is used by the Interact API lets you exchange structured JSON messages over HTTP with fast response times and low processing and resource requirements.

There are two Interact classes specific to the REST API: RestClientConnector, which serves as a helper to connect to an Interact run time instance via REST with the format of JSON, and RestFieldConstants, which describes the underlying format of the JSON message that is used for API requests and responses.

After you install the Interact design time server, a sample REST client is provided at Interact _Home/samples/javaApi/InteractRestClient.java. Although the sample code is a simple example, it provides a good starting point for demonstrating how the REST API is used.

For a complete description of the REST API classes along with all other Interact API information, see the Javadoc™ that is installed on the runtime server at Interact_Home/docs/apiJavaDoc.

(RTC721)

WDSL Changes

Over the course of several releases of Interact, the WDSL (Web Services Description Language) support used to describe the available web services was updated. For the latest WSDL information, you can view the XML files in your Interact home directory in the following location:

  • <Interact_home>/conf/InteractService.wsdl

  • <Interact_home>/conf/InteractAdminService.wsdl

Specifically, be aware of the following changes:

  • In Interact 8.6.0.2 and higher, the SOAP API WSDL is incompatible with previous versions because of enhancements.

  • In Interact 8.6.0.3, WSDL is slightly different from 8.6.0.2. However, 8.6.0.2 WSDL works with Interact 8.6.0.3 without changes.

  • See the 8.6.0.2 and 8.6.0.3 fix pack readme files for more details on specific WSDL changes relating to NameValuePairImpl and mandatory minOccurs parameters (such as relyOnExistingSessionand debug).