Home
Administrator Guide
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
About the Learning API
Unica Interact offers a learning module which uses a naive-bayesian algorithm to monitor visitor actions and propose optimal offers (in terms of acceptance). You can implement the same Java™ interface with your own algorithms using the Learning API to create your own learning module.
ILearning interface
The learning API is built around the ILearning interface. You must implement the ILearning interface to support the customized logic of your learning module.
logEvent
The logEvent method is called by the runtime server whenever the Unica Interact API posts an event that is configured to log as a contact or response. Use this method to log contact and response data to a database or file for reporting and learning purposes. For example, if you want to algorithmically determine the likelihood of a customer accepting an offer based on criteria, use this method to log the data.

Administrator Guide
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
- Administering Interact
  When you administer Unica Interact you configure and maintain users and roles, data sources, and optional product features. You also monitor and maintain the design and runtime environments. Product-specific application programming interfaces (APIs) are available for you to use.
- Security Management
  Access to the Unica Interact runtime User Interface requires authentication. Only the Login IDs defined in Unica Platform and having Unica Interact admin role can access the pages.
- Configuring users
  Unica Interact requires you to configure two sets of users, runtime environment users and design environment users.
- Managing Unica Interact data sources
  Unica Interact requires several data sources to function properly. Some data sources contain the information Unica Interact requires to function, other data sources contain your data.
- Offer serving
  You can configure Unica Interact in many ways to enhance how it selects offers to present. The following sections describe these optional features in detail.
- Understanding the Interact API
  Unica Interact serves offers dynamically to a wide variety of touchpoints. For example, you can configure the runtime environment and your touchpoint to send messages to your call center employees informing them of the best up sell or cross sell prospects for a customer who has called with a specific type of service inquiry. You can also configure the runtime environment and your touchpoint to provide tailored offers to a customer (visitor) who has entered a particular area of your Web site.
- Managing the Unica Interact API
  Whenever you use the startSession method, you create a Unica Interact runtime session on the runtime server. You can use configuration properties to manage the sessions on a runtime server.
- Classes and methods for the Unica Interact API
  The following sections list requirements and other details you should know before you work with the Unica Interact API.
- Classes and methods for the Interact JavaScript API
  The following sections list requirements and other details you should know before you work with the Unica Interact JavaScript API.
- About the ExternalCallout API
  Unica Interact offers an extensible macro, EXTERNALCALLOUT, for use with your interactive flowcharts. This macro enables you to perform custom logic to communicate with external systems during flowchart runs. For example, if you want to calculate the credit score of a customer during a flowchart run, you can create a Java™ class (a callout) to do so and then use the EXTERNALCALLOUT macro in a Select process in your interactive flowchart to get the credit score from your callout.
- Unica Interact utilities
  This section describes the administrative utilities available with Unica Interact.
- About the Learning API
  Unica Interact offers a learning module which uses a naive-bayesian algorithm to monitor visitor actions and propose optimal offers (in terms of acceptance). You can implement the same Java™ interface with your own algorithms using the Learning API to create your own learning module.
  - Configuring the runtime environment to recognize external learning modules
    You can use the Learning Java™ API to write your own learning module. You must configure the runtime environment to recognize your learning utility in Unica Platform.
  - ILearning interface
    The learning API is built around the ILearning interface. You must implement the ILearning interface to support the customized logic of your learning module.
    - initialize
      The initialize method is called once when the runtime server starts. If there are any operations that do not need to be repeated, but may impede performance during runtime, such as loading static data from a database table, they should be performed by this method.
    - logEvent
      The logEvent method is called by the runtime server whenever the Unica Interact API posts an event that is configured to log as a contact or response. Use this method to log contact and response data to a database or file for reporting and learning purposes. For example, if you want to algorithmically determine the likelihood of a customer accepting an offer based on criteria, use this method to log the data.
    - optimizeRecommendList
      The optimizeRecommendList method should take the list of recommended offers and the session data and return a list containing the requested number of offers. The optimizeRecommendList method should order the offers in some way, with your own learning algorithm. The list of offers must be ordered so that the offers you want to serve first are at the beginning of the list. For example, if your learning algorithm gives a low score to the best offers, the offers should be ordered 1, 2, 3. If your learning algorithm gives a high score to the best offers, the offers should be ordered 100, 99, 98.
    - reinitialize
      The runtime environment calls the reinitialize method every time there is a new deployment. This method passes all learning configuration data. If you have any services required by the learning API that read configuration properties, this interface should restart them.
    - shutdown
      The runtime environment calls the shutdown method when the runtime server shuts down. If there are any clean up tasks required by your learning module, they should execute at this time.
  - IAudienceID interface
    The IAudienceID interface supports the IInteractSession interface. This is an interface to the audience ID. Since your audience ID may be made of several parts, this interface enables you to access all the elements of the audience ID as well as the audience level name.
  - IClientArgs
    The IClientArgs interface supports the ILearning interface. This interface is an abstraction to cover any data passed into the server from the touchpoint that is not already covered by the session data. For example, the number of offers requested by the Unica Interact API getOffers method. This data is stored in a map.
  - IInteractSession
    The IInteractSession interface supports the ILearning interface. This is an interface to the current session in the runtime environment.
  - IInteractSessionData interface
    The IInteractSessionData interface supports the ILearning interface. This is an interface to the runtime session data for the current visitor. Session data is stored as a list of name-value pairs. You can also use this interface to change the value of data in the runtime session.
  - ILearningAttribute
    The ILearningAttribute interface supports the ILearningConfig interface. This is an interface to the learning attributes defined in configuration properties in the learningAttributes category.
  - ILearningConfig
    The ILearningConfig interface supports the ILearning interface. This is an interface to the configuration properties for learning. All of these methods return the value of the property.
  - ILearningContext
    The ILearningContext interface supports the ILearning interface.
  - IOffer
    The IOffer interface supports the ITreatment interface. This is an interface to the offer object defined in the design environment. Use the IOffer interface to collect the offer details from the runtime environment.
  - IOfferAttributes
    The IOfferAttributes interface supports the IOffer interface. This is an interface to the offer attributes that are defined for an offer in the design environment. Use the IOfferAttributes interface to collect the offer attributes from the runtime environment.
  - IOfferCode interface
    The IOfferCode interface supports the ILearning interface. This is an interface to the offer code that was defined for an offer in the design environment. An offer code can be made of one to many Strings. Use the IOfferCode interface to collect the offer code from the runtime environment.
  - LearningException
    The LearningException class supports the ILearning interface. Some methods within the interface will require implementations to throw a LearningException which is a simple subclass of java.lang.Exception. It is highly recommended for debugging purposes that the LearningException be constructed with the root exception if a root exception exists.
  - IScoreOverride
    The IScoreOverride interface supports ITreatment interface. This interface enables you to read the data defined in the score override or default offers table.
  - ISelectionMethod
    The ISelection interface indicates the method used to come up with the recommended list. The default value for the Treatment object is EXTERNAL_LEARNING so you do not have to set this value. The value is ultimately stored into Detailed Contact History for reporting purposes.
  - ITreatment interface
    The ITreatment interface supports the ILearning interface as an interface to the Treatment information. A treatment represents the offer assigned to a particular cell as defined in the design environment. From this interface, you can obtain cell and offer information as well as the assigned marketing score.
  - Learning API example
    This section contains a sample implementation of the ILearningInterface. Note that this implementation is just a sample and is not designed to be used in a production environment.
- Interact WSDL
  The Unica Interact installation includes two WDSL (Web Services Description Language) XML files that describe the available web services and how to access them. You can view these files in your Unica Interact home directory, and an example is shown here.
- Interact runtime environment configuration properties
  This section describes all the configuration properties for the Unica Interact runtime environment.
- Unica Interact Simulator
  This section describes all the configuration properties for the Unica Interact simulator.
- Interact design environment configuration properties
  This section describes all the configuration properties for Unica Interact design environment.
- Real-time offer personalization on the client side
  There may be situations where you want to provide real-time offer personalization without implementing low-level Java™ code or SOAP calls to the Unica Interact server. For example, when a visitor initially loads a web page where Javascript content is your only extended programming available, or when a visitor opens an email message where only HTML content is possible. Unica Interact provides several connectors that provide real-time offer management in situations where you have control only over the web content that is loaded on the client side, or where you want to simplify your interface to Unica Interact.
- JVM parameters
- Unica Interact and Digital Recommendations integration
  Unica Interact can integrate with IBM Digital Recommendations to provide Unica Interact-driven product recommendations. Both products can provide product recommendations for offers, but using different methods. Digital Recommendations uses a visitor's web behavior (collaborative filter) to build correlations between visitors and recommended offers. Unica Interact is based on customer's past behavior, attributes, history, and less on view-level offers, learning which offers best match a customer's behavior profile (based on demographics and other information about the customer). Offer acceptance rates help to build a predictive model through self-learning. Using the best of both products, Unica Interact can use a personal profile to define offers that will pass a category ID to Digital Recommendations and retrieve recommended products based on popularity (the "wisdom of the crowds") for display to the visitor as part of the selected offers. This can provide better recommendations for customers that will result in more click-throughs and better outcomes than either product acting alone.
- Interact and DDX integration
  With Digital Data Exchange, your website can link to Unica Interact to provide a powerful omni-channel execution engine that delivers the best offers to the optimum channels and evolves (learns) from the offer feedback to continuously increase marketing effectiveness.
- Unica Interact and Unica Journey integration
- Unica Interact and Unica Deliver integration
- Configure gateways
  Use triggered message gateways to send offer information from outbound channels.

logEvent

The logEvent method is called by the runtime server whenever the Unica Interact API posts an event that is configured to log as a contact or response. Use this method to log contact and response data to a database or file for reporting and learning purposes. For example, if you want to algorithmically determine the likelihood of a customer accepting an offer based on criteria, use this method to log the data.

logEvent(ILearningContext context,
              IOffer offer,
              IClientArgs clientArgs,
              IInteractSession session,
              boolean debug)

logEvent method workflow

context-an ILearningContext object defining the learning context of the event, for example, contact, accept, or reject.
offer-an IOffer object defining the offer about which this event is being logged.
clientArgs-an IClientArgs object defining any parameters. Currently, logEvent, does not require any clientArgs, so this parameter may be empty.
session-an IInteractSession object defining all session data.
debug-a boolean. If true, indicates the logging level verbosity for the runtime environment system is set to debug. For best results, select this value before writing to a log.

If the logEvent method fails, it throws a LearningException.

Return value

None.

Have feedback?
Google Analytics is used to store comments and ratings. To provide a comment or rating for a topic, click Accept All Cookies or Allow All in Cookie Preferences in the footer of this page.