Managing custom data

Learn how to pre-populate custom data in your campaigns and segments, blocklist data that is no longer useful, and manage custom events and attributes and properties.

Pre-populating custom data

There may be times when you’d like to set up campaigns and segments using custom data before your development team has integrated that custom data. Braze allows you to pre-populate custom events and attributes on the dashboard before these pieces of data start tracking so that these events and attributes are available for use in dropdowns and as part of the campaign creation process.

To pre-populate custom events and attributes, do the following:

1. Go to Data Settings > Custom Events or Custom Attributes or Products.

2. To add a custom attribute, event, or product, go to the respective page and select Add Custom Attributes or Add Custom Events or Add Products.
   
   For custom attributes, select a data type for this attribute (for instance, boolean or string). An attribute’s data type will determine the segmentation filters available for that attribute.
   
   
3. Select Save.

Naming custom events and custom attributes

Custom events and custom attributes are case-sensitive. Keep this in mind when your development team integrates these custom events or attributes later. They must name the custom events or attributes exactly as you named them here, or Braze will generate a different custom event or attribute.

Managing properties

After you have created a custom event or product, select Manage Properties for that event or product to add new properties, blocklist existing properties, and view which campaigns or Canvases use this property in a trigger event.

To make these added custom attributes, events, products, or event properties traceable, you must ask your development team to create it in the SDK using the exact name you used to add it earlier. Or, you can use the Braze API to import data on that attribute. After that, the custom attribute, event, or other will be actionable and apply to your users.

Blocklisting custom data

You may occasionally identify custom attributes, custom events, or purchase events that either consume too many data points, are no longer useful to your marketing strategy, or were recorded in error. To stop this data from being sent to Braze, you can blocklist a custom data object while your engineering team works to remove it from the backend of your app or website.

Blocklisting prevents a particular custom data object from being recorded by Braze going forward, meaning it won’t show up when searching for a specific user. Blocklisted data will not be sent by the SDK, and the Braze dashboard won’t process blocklisted data from other sources (for example, the API). However, blocklisting doesn’t remove data from user profiles or retroactively decrease the amount of data points incurred for that custom data object.

Blocklisting custom attributes, custom events, and products

To stop tracking a specific custom attribute, event, or product, follow these steps:

1. Search for it in the Custom Attributes, Custom Events, or Products pages.
2. Select the custom attribute, event, or product. For custom attributes and events, you can select up to 10 to blocklist at a time.
3. Select Blocklist.

You can blocklist up to 300 custom attributes and 300 custom events. To prevent collecting certain device attributes, see our SDK guide.

When a custom event or attribute is blocklisted, the following applies:

• No data sent to Braze will be processed, and blocklisted events and attributes will no longer count as data points
• Existing data will be unavailable, unless reactivated
• Blocklisted events and attributes will not show up in filters or graphs
• References to blocklisted data within drafts of active Canvases will load as invalid values, which may cause errors
• Anything using the blocklisted event or attribute will be archived

To accomplish this, Braze sends the blocklisting information down to each device. This is important when thinking about blocklisting a huge number of events and attributes (hundreds of thousands or millions) as it would be a data intensive operation.

Considerations for blocklisting

Something to consider is that blocklisting a high number of events and attributes is possible, but not advisable. This is because each time an event is performed or an attribute is (potentially) sent up to Braze, this event or attribute has to be checked against the entire blocklist. If it appears on the list, it won’t be sent up. This operation takes time, and if the list grows big enough, your app could start to slow down. If you have no need to use the event or attribute in the future, it should be removed from your app code during your next release.

Changes to the blocklist may take a few minutes to propagate. You can re-enable any blocklist event or attribute at anytime.

Deleting custom data

As you build targeted campaigns and segments, you may find that you no longer need a custom event or custom attribute. For example, if you used a specific custom attribute as part of a one-time campaign, you can delete this data after blocklisting it and removing its references from your app.

To delete a custom event or custom attribute, do the following:

1. Go to Data Settings > Custom Attributes or Custom Events, depending on which data type you want to delete.
2. Go to the custom data and select  Actions > Blocklist.
3. After your custom data has been blocklisted for 7 days, select  Actions > Delete.

How deletion works

When you delete custom data, the following occurs:

• For custom attributes: Permanently removes the attribute data from every user’s profile.
• For custom events: Permanently removes the event metadata from every user’s profile.

When an attribute or event is selected for deletion, its status is changed to Trashed. For the next seven days, it’s possible to restore the attribute or event. If you don’t restore after 7 days, the data will be permanently deleted. If you restore the attribute or event, it will be set back to the blocklisted state.

Things to know

When deleting custom data, keep in mind following details:

• Deletion is permanent. Data cannot be recovered.
• Data is removed from the Braze platform and from user profiles.
• You can “reuse” the custom attribute name or custom event name after deletion. This means if you notice that custom data “reappears” in Braze after deletion, this may be caused by an integration that hasn’t been stopped and is sending data with the same custom data name.
• You may need to blocklist an item again if your deletion results in custom data reappearing. Blocklisting status isn’t preserved because the custom data is deleted.

Forcing data type comparisons

Braze automatically recognizes data types for attribute data that is sent to us. However, in the event multiple data types are applied to a single attribute, you can force the data type of any attribute to let us know what it really is. Select from the dropdown in the Data Type column.

Data type coercion

Forced Data Type	Description
Boolean	Inputs of 1, true, t (not case sensitive) will be stored as true
Boolean	Inputs of 0, false, f (not case sensitive) will be stored as false
Number	Integers or Floats (such as 1, 1.5) will be stored as numbers

For more information on specific filter options exposed by different data type comparisons, check out Configuring reporting. And for more information on the different available data types, refer to Custom attribute data types.