Journey Builder firing event confusion

Question

I'm confused on how a Journey Builder Interaction gets initiated. For reference I'm following the book (journey builder for apps).

So I have defined a Trigger that I thought initiates the flow. For example I defined my Trigger to evaluate a Data Extension and check if a field is false or null. Then I created a REST call to populate that data extension with the fields. But nothing happens.

I also read that to initiate the Interaction you need to POST an Event to the API (How to Fire an Event).

So if I have a web form (C#) that a user enters their information into and I want that submit to start the Interaction do I not need to use the ET_DataExtensionRow and add the record to the data extension? Am I supposed to just POST the Event instead???

Answer 1

If you've got your DE configured within the Trigger then you simply need to do the REST call with the payload which includes subscriber details + any other fields from that DE that you want to populate at the time of firing the event. Have a look at the sample JSON payload:

{
    "ContactKey":"contact@mailserver.com"
    ,"EventDefinitionKey":"CONTACT-EVENT-42c791d4-1ff2-615b-2963-3ea86132c36a"
    ,"Data": {
      "email":"contact@mailserver.com",
      "abandoned_card_date_added": "2014-06-18 00:10",
      "abandoned_card_sequence_1_sent": false,
      "abandoned_card_sequence_2_sent": false,
      "abandoned_card_sequence_complete": false
    }
}

The result of the call is that new record will be inserted into the DE linked to the Event which is referenced by the EventDefinitionKey.

More info: How to Fire and Event.

Hope this helps.

Vlad