Event specifications
Event specifications are a way to organize and validate the quality of incoming data and they represent your data layer in EventStream. As mentioned earlier, events processed by EventStream are identified by the tealium_event
attribute. The value of this attribute represents the name of the event and its associated specification. The specification also indicates which event attributes are required in the event.
How it works
Event specifications are used to identify and standardize the events you want to collect in your EventStream implementation.
Here’s how it works:
- Event Name and Attributes
An event specification has a name and a list of required/optional attributes. The name is the value set in thetealium_event
attribute. For example, an event that tracks when a user performs a search would be represented bytealium_event="search"
and would have required attributessearch_term
andsearch_results
containing the searched term and the number of results returned respectively. - Marketplace or Custom Specs
EventStream comes with a marketplace of predefined event specifications for the most commonly tracked events, such ascart_add
,screen_view
,search
, et cetera. You can add these specifications to your account or create custom ones. - Associate with Data Sources
Once you’ve added specifications, they can be associated to data sources. Specs are platform neutral so a standard event such assearch
would be implemented consistently in each platform. At the same time, not all specifications will apply to every type of data source. From the Data Sources interface, you associate active specifications to the data sources that implement them. - Get Code/Installation Guide
When specifications are associated to a data source, the installation guide will automatically include code samples for each one. - Data Validation
The Live Events screen will now reflect the quality of your data based on which events match existing specifications and if they contain the required attributes.
Example event specification

{
tealium_event : "search",
search_keyword : "STRING", // the searched term
search_results : NUMBER, // number of results
product_on_page : ["STRING"] // array of product strings
}
Click Next to see how to add an event specification.
This page was last updated: February 21, 2023