The Data Element Assistant Adobe Launch Extension is now even more powerful

The original Data Element Assistant (DEA) extension helped you manipulate website data to satisfy tag management formatting requirements for analytics solutions, marketing beacons, and personalization platforms. Analytics developers saved time by avoiding custom code.

Since our own Analytics Development team uses our custom Adobe Launch Extensions, we were excited to develop new features for version 1.6. Adobe even shared feature suggestions gathered from other Launch users, making this our biggest feature release to date.

Here are the top three new features for the Data Element Assistant Adobe Launch Extension:

1. New Features for All DEA Types

All Data Element types can now extract data from a Javascript path, or data element. This makes the tool much more flexible. In the previous version, you had to create additional data elements to use some DEA features.

2. New Concatenate Features

New options give more flexibility when concatenating data, including:

• You can optionally omit a delimiter when no data is found for a particular field. In the last version, the extension returned the delimiter even if the value returned as false. This behavior is desirable in some cases and is still the default behavior however.
• If no values are found, there is now an option to return no data. The previous behavior still returned any specified delimiters.

3. New Data Element Type: Unique ID

This data element type allows you to generate, store, and retrieve a customizable, globally unique identifier using the Nano ID library. Features include:

• Customizations include length and character set.
• Storage options include local/session storage and cookies.
• Cookies can also specify domain, expiration, and whether the expiration for existing cookies should be updated when accessed.

The extension uses Nano ID with default settings to guarantee uniqueness. See the collision calculator provided by Nano ID for more detail.

Here are some potential use cases for generating a unique ID with the DEA Adobe Launch Extension:

• Create and store your own session ID
• Create and store your own user ID
• Generate an ID to identify yourself on analytics tracking calls (useful for debugging!)

“I need to send a unique user ID in Invoca calls,” Evolytics Digital MarTech Architect Jim Bradley said. “Right now I have a custom code data element to spin one up. With this update, I could use DEA and not have to write custom code.”

Our analytics developers highly recommend upgrading to the latest version of DEA if you’re already a user. If you’re ready to start using the Data Element Assistant Adobe Launch Extension, you can get more details here.

If you need a custom tool developed to meet your unique analytics tracking and business needs, we can help with that too.

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