What’s going to change
Social Engagement includes a feature that allows users to send posts to Azure Event Hubs by using Automation Rules in Social Engagement. The post content is sent in the form of a JSON object that contains the content of a post and its metadata.
As part of evolving functionality, Social Engagement is updating the JSON payload by replacing the post.profile.id field with a new post.profile.uri field.
The reason for the change is that the current implementation of the post.profile.id field is not source-specific. Consequently, the profiles of two authors with the same profile name on different platforms might end up having the same profile.id. Moving forward, post.profile.uri will also include a source-based identifier as part of the field value (for example: mse-tw://#12345678).
Impact on existing applications
Customers who build applications or workflows on Social Engagement data in Event Hubs need to review and potentially update their apps if they work with the post.profile.id field. In particular, make sure that your code does not expect the profile.id to be numeric.
Updating post.profile.id to post.profile.uri should result in no data loss on the event hub because you’ll continue to get a unique identifier for each author.
Please make sure you follow the timeline outlined below to avoid breaking your apps and intermittent data loss.
Implementation timeline
December 2017: Social Engagement 2017 Update 1.11 includes the new post.profile.uri field as part of the JSON payload. The post.profile.id field will continue to contain a numeric ID only. We recommend you update your apps that consume Social Engagement data from Azure Event Hubs to use post.profile.uri.
January 2018: Social Engagement 2017 Update 1.12 will change the value of post.profile.id to be equal to the value of post.profile.uri. Both fields will be present for six months until post.profile.id is removed. We recommend you update your apps that consume Social Engagement data from Azure Event Hubs to use post.profile.uri.
June 2018: Social Engagement 2018 Update 1.6 will remove the post.profile.id field from the JSON payload. All users must have updated their apps that consume Social Engagement data from Azure Event Hubs to use post.profile.uri as the post profile.id field will no longer be present.