Setting User Inferences

Article
11/12/2009

You might want to identify users as individuals whose browsing or buying patterns are of interest.

Commerce Server offers three options for identifying users:

Use Commerce Server identification cookies for inferences. You can set Commerce Server to automatically issue encrypted cookies that identify distinct users and associate them with user profiles in the Commerce Server database.
Use custom cookie identifiers. You can add a custom cookie identifier.
Use user names for inferences. User names are the values of the cs-username field in the W3C log files.

Note

If you previously used Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition (SSCE), the Site Server cookies that were in use at that time are now treated as custom cookies. They appear in the list of custom cookies on the Inferences tab, in the Advanced Web Log Import Properties dialog box, just beneath the text box labeled Enter new custom cookie identifier.

By default, all three options are enabled for Commerce Server. Unless you disable one or more of these options, they will be used in the following order to identify users:

MSCSProfile in the cs(Cookie) field. Profile cookie issued by Commerce Server, stored in the W3C log file.
MSCSProfile in the cs-uri-query field. Profile cookie issued by Commerce Server, passed in the URL query string if the site is in cookieless mode.
MSCSAuth in the cs(Cookie) field. Authentication cookie issued by Commerce Server, stored in the W3C log file.
MSCSAuth in the cs-uri-query field. Authentication cookie issued by Commerce Server, passed in the URL query string if the site is in cookieless mode.
Custom cookie in the cs(Cookie) field. Cookie that a user might have chosen to accept, stored in the W3C log file.
Username. Field in the W3C log file (cs-username) as defined by the HTTP specification. The HTTP server populates this field with whatever user name is available. In most Internet scenarios, this field is not populated because the users are anonymous.
Client IP and User Agent. Client IP address and client browser string as defined by the HTTP specification.

To set an inference for users

Expand Microsoft SQL Server, expand SQL Server Group, and then expand the server on which your Data Warehouse is installed.
Right-click Data Transformation Services, and then click New Package.

Alternatively, if you are changing an existing package, right-click Data Transformation Services, click All Tasks, and then select Open Package. In the Select File dialog box, click the package you want to change, and then click Open.
On the Task menu, click Web server log import (Commerce Server).
In the Import Web Server Logs dialog box, click Advanced.

In the Advanced Web Log Import Properties dialog box, on the Inferences tab, do the following:

Use this	To do this
Use Commerce Server identification cookies for inferences	Select this check box if you want to use Commerce Server cookies for user inferences.
Use user names for inferences	Select this check box if you want to use unique user names for inferences.
Use custom cookie identifiers	Select this check box if you want to use custom cookies for inferences.
Enter new custom cookie identifier	Type the identifier for your custom cookie in this box.
Add	Click to add the new custom cookie identifier.
Remove	Click to remove the selected custom cookie identifiers.
	Click to move the selected custom cookie identifier up in the list. Cookies are run in the order that they appear in this list.
	Click to move the selected custom cookie identifier down in the list. Cookies are run in the order that they appear in this list.

Click Apply, and then click OK.

The user inference is configured for the Web log file import process.
Run the Configuration synchronization DTS task to synchronize your site configuration with the Data Warehouse. For instructions, see Running the Configuration Synchronization DTS Task.

You can now import data into the Data Warehouse.

Setting User Inferences

See Also

Additional resources