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The Story

As an experienced Adobe Experience Manager developer, I have primarily focused on presentation, java bundles, and devops for an AEM website. Until recently, I did not really focus on the data science part of website interactions. The Adobe Client Data Layer (ACDL) was introduced as Adobe's solution to an event driven data layer that could be used as a standard for any website that required a data layer. Shortly after, the WCM core components project for AEM were updated to incorperate the ACDL natively and still allow for extension patterns to presentation, business logic, and now, the data layer. This was extremely interesting to me, because it meant I didn't need to build my own data layer from scratch and I had a foundation to start with. This gave me the opportunity to use an AEM website with an Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Tag property and learn more about a websites data layer.

The WCM core components update, along with my interest in Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), allowed me to dive into the data layer concept of a website and understand how to use it for analytics, targeting, personalizeation, and user interaction. In my job role, my coworkers work with analytics and personalization and their use cases typically require some type of shopping experience. This forced me to research a bit more beyond the WKND reference implementation (no commerce) and I found the Adobe eCommerce reference implementation, Venia.

Venia is an interesting project because it combines 3 seperate open source projects to build the ACDL. The WCM core components project handles events concerning the Page and typical component interactions. The CIF core components project handles some events for shopping cart interactions and product related componnents. The last project, Magento events SDK, is used for the purchasing experience including product page events, user login events, and purchase events.

As I started to develop the Venia data elements, I quickly relized that any elements that didn't use CIF or Magento could easily be used for the WKND site and other Core component enabled websites.... convienant. Because of this, I consider all the data element defined in this tutorial generic to their respective projects. This means that you should be able to use these data element examples to quickly build out your own Adobe Experience Platform Tag properties with the required rules for your project.

The WKND project has a great tutorial that helped me write my unqiue getCoreCmpJson data element to extract core component data need. Although the WKND tutorial is useful for learning, it was built before the AEP Tag extension for the ACDL was created, which means this tutorial can still be simplified by using ACDL event triggers for Rules and even some data elements.