Best Practices for Metrics

In this tutorial, you’ll learn about best practices to keep in mind when creating Audience Targeting Metrics. Before going through some best practices, you should understand the four components you can specify for a metric:

• Metric Behavior
• Tracking Mechanism
• UI for Configuration (optional)
• Language Keys (optional)

You discuss metric behavior and its UI configuration in great detail in the Tracking User Actions with Audience Targeting tutorial. To learn more about language keys and how to create, use, and generate them, visit the Internationalization tutorials.

Audience Targeting gives you the option to choose whatever frontend technology you like. In the next section, you’ll learn how to use your preferred technology for displaying content in Audience Targeting metrics.

Selecting a UI Technology

Since Liferay DXP 7.0, JSP is the preferred technology for Audience Targeting extension views. FreeMarker views, however, are still supported through their respective base classes (e.g., BaseFreemarkerTrackingAction). If you’re interested in using a technology besides JSP or FreeMarker to implement your UI, you can add a method getFormHTML to your -TrackingAction class. Here’s an example of implementing the getFormHTML method:

@Override
public String getFormHTML(
    TrackingActionInstance trackingActionInstance,
    Map<String, Object> context, Map<String, String> values) {

    String content = "";

    try {
        populateContext(trackingActionInstance, context, values);

        content = ContentTargetingContextUtil.includeJSP(
            _servletContext, getFormTemplatePath(), context);
    }
    catch (Exception e) {
        _log.error(
            "Error while processing form template " +
                getFormTemplatePath(),
            e);
    }

    return content;
}

The getFormHTML is used to retrieve the HTML created by the technology you choose, and to return it as a string that is viewable from your metric’s form. If you plan, therefore, on using an alternative to JSP or FreeMarker, you must override this method by creating and modifying it in your -TrackingAction class.

Related Topics

Tracking User Actions with Audience Targeting

Internationalization

Service Builder Persistence