Data Selection Lists store data used in for instance newsletter articles. The content differs depending on your business. For a publisher who sends a newsletter about news articles, the fields can be TITLE, DESCRIPTION, IMAGE, LINK, while a retailer who displays products in the newsletters may use fields such as PRODUCTNAME, DESCRIPTION, IMAGE, PRICE, etc.
Technical Note: The table name of a Data Selection List always starts with ARTICLE_
The fields from a Data Selection List are used in a message for personalization or to display a series of elements in a repeater in a message.
Following fields are created in a Data Selection List by default:
- ID — Unique ID of the item in the list.
- Created_DT — Date the item was created.
- Modified_DT — Date the item was last modified.
- Taxonomy — The Interest tag attributed to the item. This field is used by the Interest Tags feature to tag items and track the interest of the contact. Multiple interest tags are separated by a comma.
- Language — The language is a mandatory field in the Data Selection List because it is used to define the correct language in which an item should be displayed for a specific contact.
Note: If a field in the list is used as a lookup field, a magnifier glass icon is displayed in front of the field.
The list of default fields can be extended with custom fields.
For example, when the Data Selection List contains the products from your catalog, you can add fields to store prices, discounts, article descriptions, delivery cost, images and URLs. If the Data Selection List contains the articles of a newspaper, these custom fields can be the title of the article, the content, and the images associated.
When a Data Selection List is used in a message, a data selection needs to be defined. You can filter the items in the Data Selection List for each individual message and only retrieve data for the fields you are actually going to use in the message. Items in the list can also be sorted as required and even filtered.
