Triggered Send Data Extensions

Question

My client has decided that they wish to utilize the Triggered Send functionality of your product. We have a set of existing Data Extensions that were not created using the Triggered Send template. They are however set to be sendable on the email column. When attempting to create a trigger definition, our Data Extensions are not listed as available for use.

My question is twofold:

1. Is it a requirement to create a Data Extension using the Triggered Send template if you wish to utilize Triggered Send?
2. If it is a requirement to have created the Data Extensions using the Triggered Send template, is there a process to convert an existing Data Extension to a Triggered Send Data Extension?

Thanks in advance,

Layne

Answer 1

1. Yes - it is a requirement to use the TS data extensions if you have a data extension available.

2. There is not a programmatic way of altering/converting the type.

The triggered send data extension is not meant to send to subscribers, but rather collect those who have been sent a triggered message. The data extensions with data already in them, aren't really important in this case, since you haven't started sending.

You should be able to set up new data extensions with the TS template, and use it in your TSD.

Answer 2

To add to the above anwser, there is a way to programatically change an existing Data Extension into a Triggered Send Data Extension - or rather, to be more precise - programatically create a new Triggered Send Data Extension with the same structure as your existing Data Extension and update the Customer Key of the TS DE with you existing DE’s key.

Prequisites:

In order to convert a regular Data Extension into a TriggeredSend Data Extension we need to fulfill the following requirements:

1. TriggeredSend Data Extension should not contain a Primary Key field.

2. TriggeredSend Data Extension should be Sendable.

3. SubscriberKey and EmailAddress fields should exist and cannot be Nullable.

For full solution description and the script, vistit this blog post: How to convert a Data Extension into a TriggeredSend Data Extension using server-side Javascript