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Creating dummy users to match profiles

Before you can define identities, you need to create a dummy user for each profile you want to archive (defining an identity based on a real user is not recommended because their profile may change). You can do this easily in Firefox by viewing cookie details that have been set. The Content Data Store also show these values.

About this task

Profiling and Personalization generates a cookie when a user sets their profile in the Web site. The Archive Manager requires cookie information for each user profile to archive a page as it was presented to each user, depending on their profile. The following is an example of how to create dummy users.

Procedure

  1. Open Firefox browser and delete cookies that have been set by Profiling and Personalization.
  2. In Firefox, go to Tools > Options.
  3. In the Options window, go to Privacy tab and click the remove individual cookies link:
  4. Click View Cookies, locate the cookie set by Profiling and Personalization and click Remove Cookie:
  5. In your browser, navigate to a page on your Web site for which personalized content is available, in this example the Press Releases page:
  6. In the Content Manager, you can see the content that is available for specific users by opening the Press Room index Page; in the Component Presentations tab of the Page, each Component has Target Groups assigned that match a user profile:
  7. The Definition of a Target Group sets the cookie value (in a form on your Web site—the cookie is set when a location field is set and submitted):
  8. Go to the Page in your Web site where a user can set their profile. The following image shows a simple dummy form:
  9. In the location field, enter UK and submit to set the cookie.
  10. In Firefox, go to Tools > Options > Privacy > Cookies. Click View Cookie and note the cookie Name and Content values:
  11. You can also see user IDs in Content Data Store CUSTOMER_CHARACTERISTICS table. The following image shows this table in Microsoft SQL Server:
  12. Delete the cookie and repeat the procedure to create a user matching each profile. For example, the following users have been created that match a profile defining the region where a customer is active:
    • ID 10132 indicates a customer located and active in UK
    • ID 10132 indicates a customer located and active in NL
    • ID 10132 indicates a customer located and active in BE
    • ID 10147 indicates a customer located and active throughout Europe

What to do next

When you have set up a dummy user for each profile, you can use these user IDs to relate each profile to an "identity" defined in the Archive Manager: Relating an identity to a profile.