Configuring SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Events on an Android Application

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In an earlier article I provided step by step instructions on how mobile app developers can install and initialize the mobile SDK on Android applications. The purpose of this blog is to provide instructions on how to configure mobile events on an Android application. Future blogs will discuss topics such as how to set up mobile messages, how to show spots, and how to handle navigation within a mobile application.

Mobile events can be used to capture specific information about how mobile app users interact with app content. Events can then be used to trigger a task, set a metric, or define a segment.

SAS Customer Intelligence 360 uses a unique mobile event key to identify the event type to send. In the following example, I have created an event that is sent after a user finishes checking the availability of rooms in our hotel app.

First, I create the new event in SAS Customer Intelligence 360. The mobile event key that is entered in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 will be the same as the event ID that is entered into the applications code.

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When defining an event, you can also create an optional event attribute map so that you can collect information about the context of the event.

These event attributes are created in the Custom Attributes tab within SAS Customer Intelligence 360:

In the application's code, we create an Event Attribute map:

This map adds the attributes of check-in date, check-out date, number of adults, and number of children. It also specifies whether the room is available:

To send an event to the mobile SDK, call this event in your application code (Note that the event Name checkAvailability1 is the same as the event key name in SAS Customer Intelligence 360, and the attribute map checkAvailabilityEventAttr was created above):

If you do not want to include any event attributes along with your event, the code would look like this:

To send multiple events, the addAppEvents() method along with SASCollectorEvent is used.

There are two ways that you can add attributes to SASCollectorEvent.

First, create the event using SASCollectorEvent and use the addAttribute option:

Second, you can create an attribute map and then add the map using setAttributes:

If you don’t want the event to have an attribute, just use SASCollectorEvent:

Then you’d add all the events that I listed out above and send them via addAppEvents:

There are specific event types such as Add to Cart Events, Cart Events, and Internal Search Events. For more details and instructions on how to handle these specific event types see SAS Help Center: Working with Events.

Additionally, I am currently developing the SAS Customer Intelligence 360: Mobile SDK course. This course delves into more detail about the Mobile SDK, and will include a demonstration on how to configure Events on an Android application. Once finished this course will be accessible from the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Learning Subscription.