Assigning Segments to Pimcore Elements

In addition to customers, it is also possible to assign segments to other Pimcore elements. So, elements like documents can be tagged with segments. That information can be used later on for several use cases, e.g. tracking activities like user xy has visited several pages that are tagged with a certain segment. So that an interaction with those elements creates a connection between the customer and the segment.

Configuration

The assignment of segments can be configured to better suit your needs in the configuration.

Allowed element types

The types of elements segments can be assigned to are specified within the symfony configuration. The structure can be seen in the example below:

pimcore_customer_management_framework:
    segment_assignment_classes:
      types:
        document:
          page: true
          email: true
        asset:
          image: true
        object:
          object:
            Product: true
            ShopCategory: true
          folder: true

Below types, every Pimcore element type has its own sub tree where in each valid sub type is represented as a boolean value with the exception of object. For those, explicit class names must be specified.
All types default to false so only those required need to be configured.

Segment Assignment

To assign segments to elements, just open the additional Segment Assignment tab (which is visible as soon as the segment assignment is activated for the certain type) and assign segments via drag & drop or the search function.

Inheritance

Assignments of segments are inherited along the element's tree so they can be conveniently set for whole groups of elements.

However, this might not always be intended.

Breaking the chain of inheritance

Using the checkbox, you can disable inheritance for any node in the tree and, by extension, remove implicitly assigned segments of parents from that node's children.

Use Assigned Segments for Targeting and Personalization

The assigned segment can be a valuable data source for targeting and personalization. Therefore Pimcore automatically issues Track Segement actions every time a document with assigned segments is opened by an user. This information is stored in the Targeting Store of Pimcore and can be used by the Pimcore Targeting Rules. See Personalization for details.

For assets and objects, no automatic action or functionality is provided.

Indexing

As an effort towards scalable performance, assigned segments, both inherited and directly assigned, are indexed in a separate table as a simple id mapping.

Whenever an element's assigned segments are saved using SegmentAssignerInterface, that element and its children are queued to be indexed by IndexerInterface which can be called via the cmf:maintenance cli command (e.g. as a CronJob).

Working with assignments

Retrieving assigned segments for an element

To retrieve segments assigned to a certain element, SegmentManagerInterface::getSegmentsForElement and SegmentManagerInterface::getSegmentsForElementId return an array of fully hydrated CustomerSegments.

Filter elements by assigned segments

When working with Pimcore listings, QueryServiceInterface can provide you with a condition narrowing the results down to elements that are assigned a specific single segment, one or more, or all segments in an array of ids.
The relevant element type is determined by the type of the provided Listing and the condition is directly added to it.
Usage:

<?php
$queryService = \Pimcore::getContainer()->get(QueryServiceInterface::class); //or however you access your services
$listing = new Listing();
$queryService->bySegmentIds($listing, [1, 2, 3], $concatMode = QueryServiceInterface::MODE_DISJUNCTION); // OR-concatenation
$queryService->bySegmentIds($listing, [4, 5], $concatMode = QueryServiceInterface::MODE_CONJUNCTION); // AND-concatenation