Types of Events
Let's review what types of events are available:
Structured event has five fields, two fields (Category and Action) are required, others are not:
Category - category of event
Action - action performed or event name
Label - the object of the action e.g. the SKU of the product added-to-basket
Property - a property associated with the object of the action
Value - a value associated with the event / action e.g. the value of goods added-to-basket
Example and description can be added to categories. Note that 'Example' field is required for the fields with 'Required' check mark.
Unstructured and context events will have the same layout of template:
Unstructured events are a flexible tool that enable users to define their own event types and send them into Snowplow.
When a user sends in a custom unstructured event, they do so as a JSON of name-value properties that conforms to a JSON schema defined for the event earlier.
Context events enable users to define their own entities that are related to events, and fields that are related to each of those entities. For example, an online retailer may choose to define a "User" context, to store information about a particular user, which might include data points like the users Facebook ID, age, membership details etc. In addition, they may also define a "Product" context, with product data e.g. SKU, name, created date, description, tags etc.
Unlike structures events these types of events can consist of flexible number of fields and user can choose the name, type of values in the field (e.g. numeric, string etc) which will define the validation of the values in the field, min and max length and pattern.
Ecommerce transactions. Single transactions typically span multiple lines of data so this type of events has a lot of field, most important are checked as 'Required' by default. The image below shows ecommerce transaction template with short explanation of each field in description column (it will be empty by default):
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