
	User Management Guide

CHAPTER 7 Profiling with Rules

This chapter describes an alternative method of profiling, using rules instead of attributes.

This chapter has these sections:

For more information For an overview of profiling with rules, see The User subsystem.

Using rules for user profiling and personalization

If you are developing an application that implements profiling extensively, you should consider using Director's Rule subsystem. The following scenario suggests how rules can be applied to user profiling.

Suppose you have a retail Web site where you want to track the total amounts of customers' Web purchases and specify a threshold amount that triggers a special discount. Here is how you could use rules to develop this application:

Add a user attribute to track the amount—AllPurchasesAmt, for example.
In the Rule Editor, create a rule using the built-in CheckWhiteboard condition that allows you to check user profiles (through the ^attributename syntax). Enter a threshold amount and give it a key value—such as ^threshold. For the action section you can return a boolean or appropriate content.
In your component:
- Get the purchase amount for a completed transaction.
- Get the attribute value, add the purchase amount, and update the total.
- Set the value on the session whiteboard using the EbiContext.setValue() method. Give it the keyname you defined in the rule.
- Fire the rule and handle the result.

For more information, see the chapter on developing rules and pipelines in the Rules Guide.

Conditions and actions

Conditions and actions are available in the Director rules engine to interact with the User and Content Management subsystems (through the Content Query Action). This means you can easily implement personalization rules like this:

  If "UserAge" > 35
  AND "PortfolioTotal" > 30,000
  Then Select Investing Documents Level 3
  AND set "FinanceLevel" to "Gold"

Through Director's easy-to-use API, custom tag library, and rules engine conditions and actions, you can quickly deliver personalization services to users. This persistence mechanism for user data is leveraged by other Director subsystems to store user-related information. The Portal subsystem, for example, stores user-defined layouts, pages settings, and component customization parameters.


	User Management Guide