$wsdl = 'https://webservice.exacttarget.com/etframework.wsdl';

/* Create the Soap Client */
$client = new ExactTargetSoapClient($wsdl, array('trace'=>1));

/* Set username and password here */
$client->username = "username";
$client->password = "password";

$sf_1 = new ExactTarget_SimpleFilterPart();
$sf_1->Property = "First Name";
$sf_1->SimpleOperator = ExactTarget_SimpleOperators::equals;
$sf_1->Value = "Nick";

$sf_1 = new SoapVar($sf_1, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT, 'SimpleFilterPart', "http://exacttarget.com/wsdl/partnerAPI");

$sf_2 = new ExactTarget_SimpleFilterPart();
$sf_2->Property = "First Name";
$sf_2->SimpleOperator = ExactTarget_SimpleOperators::equals;
$sf_2->Value = "Mike";

$sf_2 = new SoapVar($sf_2, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT, 'SimpleFilterPart', "http://exacttarget.com/wsdl/partnerAPI");

$cf = new ExactTarget_ComplexFilterPart();
$cf->LeftOperand = $sf_1;
$cf->LogicalOperator = ExactTarget_LogicalOperators::_OR;
$cf->RightOperand = $sf_2;

$cf = new SoapVar($cf, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT, 'ComplexFilterPart', "http://exacttarget.com/wsdl/partnerAPI");

$fd = new ExactTarget_FilterDefinition();
$fd->Name = "My Filter Name";
$fd->CustomerKey = "my_filter_key";
$fd->Description = "My API Filter";
$fd->DataFilter = $cf;

$object = new SoapVar($fd, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT, 'FilterDefinition', "http://exacttarget.com/wsdl/partnerAPI");

$request = new ExactTarget_CreateRequest();
$request->Options = NULL;
$request->Objects = array($object);
$results = $client->Create($request);

var testDE = DataExtension.Init("testDE");
var data = testDE.Rows.Lookup(["Age"], [25], 2, "LastName");

The first two arguments of the function are the column to search and then the value to search for. It is very simple, but what gets overlooked is that the first two parameters actually accept array data types as their arguments. This means that multiple columns can be searched on for their respective values! Take a look at what I mean:

var testDE = DataExtension.Init("testDE");
var data = testDE.Rows.Lookup(["Age", "Zipcode"], [25, "45014"], 2, "LastName");

This will return all records where the age equals 25 and the zipcode equals 45014. Using multi-column lookups will help return smaller record sets, which cuts down on additional filtering and load time. Hopefully, this will be useful in extending the functionality and efficiency of your ExactTarget emails. Click here to download the entire source code example.

What TACA Does For Us

As you know there are 50 states within the US and thus I will have to generate 50 different types of content, one for each state. Now, I can send the email without using TACA and it will work just fine, but it will not be the most efficient. Imagine if I wanted to send an email to every single person in the US (approx 300 million people). This would mean I would have to generate the content for every subscriber, which as you can imagine would really slow this send down. Enter TACA. What if I could cache the content for each state and then send? This is exactly what TACA allows us to do. Let’s take a look at some theoretical code.

1. First, the TACA syntax: TreatAsContentArea(“unique_key”, “content”, “impression_region”)

The first parameter is the unique identifier for the content. In our theoretical case we could use the state abbreviation, which is easily found by pulling it from the subscriber’s attributes. As for the content, we could use a pre-generated content area or a lookup from a content area. Finally, the last parameter defines the impression region for the content.

2. How Exactly Does TACA work?

This is probably the simplest thing about TACA and makes everything make sense. For each unique key that TACA uses it caches the content for that key. When that key is used later during the send the data is pulled from cache rather than evaluating the content parameter. For example, say our first subscriber lives in California. The first time through TACA, we give it a unique key of CA based off the subscriber’s attribute. The next subscriber is from Ohio, so their key is OH. The third subscriber is from California, so TACA takes initiative here. When we again insert CA as the key for the third subscriber, it pulls from cache the CA key and doesn’t evaluate the content parameter twice. Likewise, any subsequent duplicate key will retrieve the cached content.

3. How to use with External APIs?

The idea of caching when using external APIs is very very important. In our theoretical situation recall we wanted to send to approx. 300 million people, but most APIs don’t let us hit their API more that a couple thousand times an hour if that. So what do you do? Cache it. In our example case we only have 50 possible combinations, so if we were to use the weather.com API, why would we want to ping the API 300 million times when we only have to do it 50 times. This is the true beauty of TACA. Let’s take an example:

TreatAsContentArea(“OH”, HTTPGet(“http://weather.com/get/?state=oh), “weather”)

This will retrieve data from the “theoretical” API endpoint and store it under the key OH. However, we need to make one addition in order to mitigate the risk of HTML content being retrieved by TACA and then rendering it. We want to encode the content prior to caching it. We’ll use Base64Encode and then Base64Decode when we want to use the content.

Set @weather = TreatAsContentArea(“OH”, Base64Encode(HTTPGet(“http://weather.com/get/?state=oh)), “weather”)
Set @weather = Base64Decode(@weather)

This will let you retrieve the data from the API without going over on your API usage!

%%=Lookup("PostalCode", "City", "PostalCode", 46016)=%%

This is a single condition lookup that targets the “PostalCode” data extension, sorts by “City”, and finds only cities with “PostalCode” equaling 46016. But what if I wanted to find cities with “PostalCode” equaling 46016 and 45236? Without a multi-conditional lookup I would have to look over the result set of the first lookup and perform lookups for each of those results. That route is very time consuming and will slow down the send time of the email greatly. What ExactTarget fails to mention about their Lookup function is that they are all multi-conditional. The real syntax should be: Lookup(DE,Order,Condition₁,Value₁…Condition_n, Value_n). This would then make our lookup for multiple postal codes as such:

%%=Lookup("PostalCode", "City", "PostalCode", 46016, "PostalCode", 45236)=%%

This will create the multi-conditional lookup that we were wanting and like the proposed syntax one can create infinitely many conditions. Hope this helps in creating your dynamic emails!

Enough with the intro get to it!
Download the ExactTarget SOAP API Wrapper