Work with schemas gs-ac-schemas

The physical and logical structure of the data carried in the application is described in XML. It obeys a grammar specific to Adobe Campaign, called a schema.

A schema is an XML document associated with a database table. It defines data structure and describes the SQL definition of the table:

It also describes the XML structure used to store data:

Schemas enable you to define an entity in the database. There is a schema for each entity.

Adobe Campaign employs Data Schemas to:

For a better understanding of Campaign built-in tables and their interaction, refer to this section.

Syntax of schemas syntax-of-schemas

The root element of the schema is <srcschema>. It contains the <element> and <attribute> sub-elements.

The first <element> sub-element coincides with the root of the entity.

<srcSchema name="recipient" namespace="cus">
  <element name="recipient">
    <attribute name="lastName"/>
    <attribute name="email"/>
    <element name="location">
      <attribute name="city"/>
   </element>
  </element>
</srcSchema>

The <element> tags define the names of entity elements. <attribute> tags of the schema define the names of the attributes in the <element> tags which they have been linked to.

Identification of a schema identification-of-a-schema

A data schema is identified by its name and its namespace.

A namespace lets you group a set of schemas by area of interest. For example, the cus namespace is used for customer-specific configuration (customers).

Reserved namespaces reserved-namespaces

Certain namespaces are reserved for descriptions of the system entities required for the operation of the Adobe Campaign application. The following namespace must not be used to identify a new schema, in any upper/lower case combination:

The identification key of a schema is a string built using the namespace and the name separated by a colon; for example: nms:recipient.

Create or extend Campaign schemas create-or-extend-schemas

To add a field or other element to one of the core data schemas in Campaign, such as the recipient table (nms:recipient), you have to extend that schema.

For more on this, refer to Extend a schema.

To add an entirely new type of data that does not exist in Adobe Campaign (a table of contracts for example) you can create a custom schema directly.

For more on this, refer to Create a new schema.

Once you have created or extended a schema to work in, the best practice is to define its XML content elements in the same order they appear in below.

Enumerations enumerations

Enumerations are defined first, before the main element of the schema. They allow you to display values in a list in order to restrict the choices that the user has for a given field.

Example:

<enumeration basetype="byte" name="exTransactionTypeEnum" default="store">
<value label="Website" name="web" value="0"/>
<value label="Call Center" name="phone" value="1"/>
<value label="In Store" name="store" value="2"/>
</enumeration>

When defining fields, you can then use this enumeration like so:

<attribute desc="Type of Transaction" label="Transaction Type" name="transactionType"
type="string" enum="exTransactionTypeEnum"/>

Keys keys

Every table must have at least one key, and often it is automatically established in the main element of the schema by using the autopk attribute set to true.

In addition, in the context of an Enterprise (FFDA) deployment, use the @autouuid and set it to true.

The primary key can also be defined using the internal attribute.

Example:

<key name="householdId" internal="true">
  <keyfield xpath="@householdId"/>
</key>

In this example, instead of letting the @autopk or the @autouuid attribute create a default primary key named “id” we are specifying our own “householdId” primary key.

Learn more about keys in this section.

Attributes (Fields) attributes--fields-

Attributes allow you to define the fields which make up your data object. You can use the Insert button in the schema edition toolbar to drop empty attribute templates into your XML where your cursor is. Learn more in this section.

The full list of attributes is available in the <attribute> element section in Campaign Classic v7 documentation. Here are some of the more commonly used attributes: @advanced, @dataPolicy, @default, @desc, @enum, @expr, @label, @length, @name, @notNull, @required, @ref, @xml, @type.

For more information on each attribute, refer to the Attribute description in Campaign Classic v7 documentation.

Examples examples

Example of defining a default value:

<attribute name="transactionDate" label="Transaction Date" type="datetime" default="GetDate()"/>

Example of using a common attribute as a template for a field also marked as mandatory:

<attribute name="mobile" label="Mobile" template="nms:common:phone" required="true" />

Example of a computed field that is hidden using the @advanced attribute:

<attribute name="domain" label="Email domain" desc="Domain of recipient email address" expr="GetEmailDomain([@email])" advanced="true" />

Example of an XML field also stored in an SQL field and which has an @dataPolicy attribute.

<attribute name="secondaryEmail" label="Secondary email address" length="100" xml="true" sql="true" dataPolicy="email" />

Links links

Links are some of the last elements in the main element of your schema. They define how all of the different schemas in your instance relate to one another.

Links are declared in the schema that contains the foreign key of the table to which it is linked.

There are three types of cardinality: 1-1, 1-N, and N-N. It is the 1-N type that is used by default.

Examples examples-1

An example of a 1-N link between the recipient table (out-of-the-box schema) and a table of custom transactions:

<element label="Recipient" name="lnkRecipient" revLink="lnkTransactions" target="nms:recipient" type="link"/>

An example of a 1-1 link between a custom schema “Car” (in the “cus” namespace) and the recipient table:

<element label="Car" name="lnkCar" revCardinality="single" revLink="recipient" target="cus:car" type="link"/>

Example of an external join between the recipient table and a table of addresses based on the email address and not a primary key:

<element name="emailInfo" label="Email Info" revLink="recipient" target="nms:address" type="link" externalJoin="true">
  <join xpath-dst="@address" xpath-src="@email"/>
</element>

Here “xpath-dst” corresponds to the primary key in the target schema and “xpath-src” corresponds to the foreign key in the source schema.

Audit trail audit-trail

One useful element you may want to include at the bottom of your schema is a tracking element (Audit trail).

Use the example below to include fields relating to the creation date, the user that created the data, the date, and the author of the last modification for all data in your table:

<element aggregate="xtk:common:auditTrail" name="auditTrail"/>

Updating the database structure updating-the-database-structure

Once your changes are completed and saved, any changes that may impact the SQL structure need to be applied to the database. To do this, use the database update assistant.

For more on this, refer to this section.