Managing user events

This page describes how to view and delete user events. For information about recording user events as they happen, see Recording user events. To import user event data from past events, see Importing user events.

Removing user events

Generally, you should leave user events in place after they have been recorded. However, if you have user events that were not recorded properly, you can remove them from your event store using the userEvents.purge method.

Specify the events you want to remove by using a filter string. This supports selectively deleting user events by filtering on the eventTime, eventType, visitorID, and userID fields.

Because you cannot undo the delete, test your filter string by conducting a dry run before deleting user events. The force field is set to false by default; this setting will return the number of events to be deleted without actually deleting them. When you are ready to actually delete the user events, set the force field to true.

curl

This example filters for a time range, which must use the Zulu Time date format. The force field is set to false.

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer "$(gcloud auth application-default print-access-token)"" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  --data '{
    "filter":"eventTime > \"2019-12-23T18:25:43.511Z\" eventTime < \"2019-12-23T18:30:43.511Z\"",
    "force":"false"
  }' \
  "https://retail.googleapis.com/v2/projects/[PROJECT_ID]/locations/global/catalogs/default_catalog/userEvents:purge"

You should receive a response object that looks something like this, where purge-user-events-54321 is the operation ID:

{
  "name": "projects/[PROJECT_ID]/locations/global/catalogs/default_catalog/operations/purge-user-events-54321"
}

This example requests the operation status:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth application-default print-access-token)" \
"https://retail.googleapis.com/v2/projects/[PROJECT_ID]/locations/global/catalogs/default_catalog/operations/[OPERATION_ID]"

Operation status example:

{
  "name": "projects/[PROJECT_ID]/locations/global/catalogs/default_catalog/operations/[OPERATION_ID]",
  "done": true,
  "response": {
    "@type": "type.googleapis.com/google.cloud.retail.v2main.PurgeUserEventsResponse",
    "purgedEventsCount": "1"
  }
}

Setting the force field to true forces the delete to occur.

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer "$(gcloud auth application-default print-access-token)"" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  --data '{
    "filter":"eventTime > \"2019-12-23T18:25:43.511Z\" eventTime < \"2019-12-23T18:30:43.511Z\"",
    "force":"true"
  }' \
"https://retail.googleapis.com/v2/projects/[PROJECT_ID]/locations/global/catalogs/default_catalog/userEvents:purge"

Viewing aggregated user event information

You can view the number of recorded user events for your project in the Event tab on the Recommendations AI Data page. Metrics will appear about 24 hours after you first upload events to Recommendations AI.

Using the user event filter

You can filter user events to be deleted.

The filter is a string that contains one or more of the following restrictions:

• eventTime

  Provides a timestamp to bound the events to be deleted. This filter can be specified once or twice, with a greater-than (>) or less-than (<) symbol. The bounded time must be a single, contiguous block.

• eventType

  Restrict the events to be deleted to a single event type.

• visitorID

  Restrict the events to be deleted to a single visitor ID.

• userID

  Restrict the events to be deleted to a single user ID.

Only user events that satisfy all of the restrictions are deleted.

To delete all user events of type add-to-cart that were logged on or after February 1, 2019, you would provide the following filter string:

eventTime > "2019-02-01T00:00:00Z" eventType = add-to-cart