[Bonus] Exploring the Segmentation Service API

8 min

In this exercise, you’ll use Postman and Adobe I/O to create an audience, by making use of Adobe Experience Platform’s APIs.

At the moment, in the scope of Real Time Customer Profile, the terms segment and audience are interchangeable. Audience is the new name of what Adobe used call segment. The Product Management is working to update all the materials with the new term, but some elements in docs and APIs still have use "segment".

Create an audience

Creating an audience using the AEP API's require a number of steps in Postman. But first...

Locate the AEP Bootcamp collection.
Open the Segmentation Service API folder.

Step 1 - Create a segment definition

We will first create a segment definition.

Select POST Create a new segment definition.
Click on the Body tab to see the body of the request.

You see the segment expression defined in the Profile Query Language, PQL. You can find more information and documentation about PQL.

Update the name value within the Body request. E.g. replace demo with your user identification.
The body should look like:

{
    "name" : "sacker - API - All Female Customers",
    "expression" : {"type":"PQL", "format":"pql/json", "value":"{\"nodeType\":\"fnApply\",\"fnName\":\"in\",\"params\":[{\"nodeType\":\"fieldLookup\",\"fieldName\":\"gender\",\"object\":{\"nodeType\":\"fieldLookup\",\"fieldName\":\"person\",\"object\":{\"nodeType\":\"literal\",\"literalType\":\"XDMObject\",\"value\":\"profile\"}}},{\"literalType\":\"List\",\"nodeType\":\"literal\",\"value\":[\"female\"]}]}"},
    "createdBy": "labs",
    "schema" : { "name" : "_xdm.context.profile"},
    "ttlInDays" : 90
}

You should also verify the Headers of your request.

Select Headers tab.
You will see same set of header key/value pairs as in the earlier Postman example requests.
No action required.

To create the segment:

Click on Send.
View the results in the Body section at the bottom.

You can now also view your segment definition in the UI.

Login to Adobe Experience Platform.
Go to Audiences.
Select Browse tab.

You should see your created segment in the list of Audiences.

Step 2 - Create a Segment Job Request

In the previous exercise, you created a streaming segment. A streaming segment continuously evaluates qualifications in real-time. What we will do now is creating a job request. Job request will evaluate all the current profiles available in AEP against the segment logic, and qualify the profiles that match the logic.

Let’s now POST a Segment Job:

Go to Postman.
Open the Segmentation Service API folder (if not already open).
Select the POST Create a segment job request.
Click on Send.

The segment job is now running, and this may take some time.

Step 3 - GET Segment Job Status

To get an update on the status of the segment job:

Go to Postman.
Select the GET Retrieve a segment job request.
Click on Send.

You will most likely see in the Body response that the request is QUEUED. You can repeat this request multiple times and after a while status should be set to SUCCEEDED.

Once the status is SUCCEEDED, your segment job has run and customers are now qualifying for the segment.

You have now successfully created a streaming and a batch segment using the Adobe Experience Platform APIs.