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Administrator Guide
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
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.
Unica Interact API Classes
The Unica Interact API is based on the InteractAPI class.
REST prerequisites
One method of calling the Unica Interact API is by using JSON (JavaScript™ Object Notation) format calls over HTTP, referred to here as the REST API. The REST API has the advantage of having better performance than SOAP, although the Java™ serialization adapter is still the fastest method for Unica Interact API calls.

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.
  - Unica Interact API Classes
    The Unica Interact API is based on the InteractAPI class.
    - Methods to pass the authentication parameters if API Authentication enabled before API calls
      If API Authentication is enabled then you can use following methods to pass the authentication parameters such as credentials or token before any API call.
    - Java serialization over HTTP prerequisites
      The Java™ client adapter uses Java serialization over HTTP.
    - SOAP prerequisites
      Before you can access the runtime server with SOAP, you do several prerequisite tasks to configure your environment.
    - REST prerequisites
      One method of calling the Unica Interact API is by using JSON (JavaScript™ Object Notation) format calls over HTTP, referred to here as the REST API. The REST API has the advantage of having better performance than SOAP, although the Java™ serialization adapter is still the fastest method for Unica Interact API calls.
    - API JavaDoc
      In addition to Unica Interact Administrator guide, the Javadoc for the Unica Interact API is installed with the runtime server. The Javadoc is installed for your reference in the Unica Interact_Home/docs/apiJavaDoc directory.
    - About API examples
      All of the examples in the guide were created with the Java™ serialization over HTTP adapter. The classes generated from the WSDL can vary based on the SOAP toolkit and the options you select. If you are using SOAP, these examples might not work the same in your environment.
  - Working with session data
    When you initiate a session with the startSession method, session data is loaded into memory. Throughout the session, you can read and write to the session data (which is a superset of the static profile data).
  - About the InteractAPI class
    The InteractAPI class contains the methods which you use to integrate your touchpoint with the runtime server. All other classes and methods in the Unica Interact API support the methods in this class.
  - About the AdvisoryMessage class
    The advisoryMessage class contains methods which define the advisory message object. The advisory message object is contained in the Response object. Every method in the InteractAPI returns a Response object. (Except for the executeBatch method, which returns a batchResponse object.)
  - About the AdvisoryMessageCode class
    The advisoryMessageCode class contains methods which define the advisory message codes. You retrieve the advisory message codes with the getMessageCode method.
  - About the BatchResponse class
    The BatchResponse class contains methods which define the results of the executeBatch method.
  - About the Command interface
    The executeBatch method requires you to pass in an array of objects that implements the Command interface. You should use the default implementation, CommandImpl to pass in the Command objects.
  - About the NameValuePair interface
    Many methods in the Unica Interact API either return NameValuePair objects or require you to pass NameValuePair objects as arguments. When passing as arguments into a method, you should use the default implementation NameValuePairImpl.
  - About the Offer class
    The Offer class contains methods which define an Offer object. This offer object contains many of the same properties of an offer in Unica Campaign.
  - About the OfferList class
    The OfferList class contains methods which define the results of the getOffers method.
  - About the Response class
    The Response class contains methods which define the results of any of the InteractAPI class methods.
- 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.
- 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.

REST prerequisites

One method of calling the Unica Interact API is by using JSON (JavaScript™ Object Notation) format calls over HTTP, referred to here as the REST API. The REST API has the advantage of having better performance than SOAP, although the Java™ serialization adapter is still the fastest method for Unica Interact API calls.

Before you begin using the REST API, be aware of the following:

The URL that supports REST calls to the Unica Interact API is:
http://Unica Interact_Runtime_Server:PORT/interact/servlet/RestServlet, substituting the actual host name or IP address of the Unica Interact runtime server and the port on which Unica Interact is deployed.
There are two Unica Interact classes specific to the REST API: RestClientConnector, which serves as a helper to connect to an Unica 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.
A sample REST client is provided at Unica Interact _Home/samples/javaApi/InteractRestClient.java. Although the sample code is a simple example, it should provide 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 Unica Interact API information, see the Javadoc installed on the runtime server at Unica Interact_Home/docs/apiJavaDoc.
The REST API returns SessionIDs and messages in the HTML-escaped format and not in the Unicode format.
If API Authentication is enabled, then need to pass credentials or token in the request header.
- Input Header Parameters
  - Credentials
    - m_user_name
    - Header Parameter — Platform username
    - m_user_password
    - Header Parameter — Platform user password
  - Token
    - m_tokenId
    - Header Parameter — token
- Output Header Parameters
  - m_tokenId
  - Header Parameter — token

Other than the information mentioned here, the REST API supports all of the methods that are supported by the other protocols for using the Unica Interact API.

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