MiaProva Blog

okay so this is hopefully a quick video regarding adobe target host groups environments we are helping a big mia provo customer put testing as part of their email service so what they’re doing is actually quite fascinating and it’s awesome and this is a company that makes heavy use of adobe target across their public www properties and a really rich personalization program and they got really cool tools to manage their personalization program at mia prova but this team wanted to incorporate every target to do testing within their email platform and so what i’m going to go over now is something that team wasn’t familiar with they didn’t know about that option and i had several meetings with other adobe target customers today and was asking them as if they knew about this as well and it wasn’t something that was well understood so i said hey i’ll put together a quick video so every time adobe target gets called every time server side client side there’s something called the host group that gets passed along so you guys are probably all familiar with mbox parameters and profile parameters those lovely things you’re seeing them through the mia provo chrome extension here wonderful things that get automatically passed to adobe target client site or server side but there’s another thing that gets passed along so i’m going to copy doo doo doo doo it’s very it’s a lot easier to see this within here so i’m going to copy the mbox request or the adobe target server side request here copy is it a curl i’ll jump over to my lovely visual studio code and so this is what it looks like but the client side actually came from me at provo.com because it actually came from our home page so it’s it’s not something you can fake here or change here wherever the mbox or the adobe target server call came from is the host that gets passed along to adobe target but i’m going to go ahead and switch this to mia franklin franklin’s my dog who is sitting here next to me here so i’m going to generate a server call to adobe target by basically taking this data passing it over to adobe target but i want to show you something here in terms of like the the host groups so i’m just going to go to host groups here in brian so you can see brian and let me type in franklin so you know that that isn’t in here so what you will all see in this host group column is every single domain that adobe target made a request from in your account so you can see it’s empty and i wanted to show you just how quick this is so jumping back to a visual studio code i’m going to mimic the request boom so this is the response or response from adobe target you can see i have a lot of things going on here so i’ve got as you see on my home page lots of activities i demo help debug and show off a lot of things here so the response that you see here is just that all of the different activities the offer code basically what gets back what returns from the browser all cool stuff that powers your client-side testing you can see here all of the response tokens i make heavy use of that here as well so all dandy all works fun and easy but this testing team that wanted the email team that was building this service to put adobe target server-side using the delivery api wanted the ability to come into adobe target set up activities do their thing rock and roll but there was concerns given that the team was new to target they didn’t want to give them approver rights which which would essentially blow allow them to touch other activities if they use the wrong mbox name as part of the delivery apis it could create potential problems so lots of different custom things were talked about and then i was brought aware that i’ve made aware of the situations i’ve brought up host groups long term though long term it’s it’s definitely going to be the workspaces longer long term but for now as they’re building out this service we can incorporate workspaces later but host groups was the way to go so we wanted to give them the ability to get to to to modify activities modify offers because you could modify you can’t modify an offer if it’s live unless you have approver status here so what we did here is here’s an example of an adobe target server side call so we got my mbox name that’s taking place domain whatever so i’m going to update this to thinking is it mia dash franklin so oh let’s check to see so i’m going to so i’ll just make this call really quick to adobe server side boom nothing ah this is default content didn’t get any content returned but i’m going to come over to here let’s look at the host groups and see if i got franklin in there let’s see let’s try brian there’s brian let’s try mia dash franklin there it is mia dash franklin so this is a production host group and so what that means is that if it’s a production host group that the activity has to be approved has to be turned on there’s no way around that and this is the activity that we’re using host demo it’s not not approved but what we can do is we can say okay for staging host group for for activities and staging let’s change the activity mode to active and inactive activities and so i’m going to hit save here so i say that so basically if it’s a staging host group that means unapproved like this activity here it’s inactive should technically be able to fire so let me go over here and search for mia franklin i’m going to change the environment i’m going to change franklin over to staging and hit save so that’s now staging my activity here let’s take a look at this it’s using host demo i’m just returning this json object hello world no targeting in place because i’m using you know i’m using basically this this mbox name um don’t say to do not approve so let’s go back over to studio code i’ll close this response here and i will do a refresh boom lovely so there you go so you can see kind of i got my content back as well i cut the response back as well as all of the response tokens as well so this was huge so just to kind of refresh host groups very very powerful way to allow organizations to qa things but be careful though if you were to put a host group in there let’s say your your development or staging environment what could what could happen like so for example if if i were to use something like if i were to go to let’s say miaprova.com if i were to put me a pro let me put www if i were to change this to staging what would that happen is that all of the unapproved activities on the site so basically all of the ones that are inactive within fire so something to be very very careful with for this particular situation was really helpful um and there you have it