Braze Datatypes and Custom Attributes

Do you know all the Braze Datatypes? What the heck is a Boolean, and how do you even pronounce this word?

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[Braze-mas 2023, Day 4]

What’s up everyone, my name is Allan, Founder and Consultant at For Now Marketing, and welcome to Day 4 of Braze-mas 2023!

Today, we’ll be talking about Braze Datatypes. It’s a simple yet foundational concept that’ll be super helpful anytime you’re working with Braze data. And this concept of datatypes carries over to any software you work with because datatypes is a core concept of computer science in general.

By the way, Braze Datatypes are so closely related to Braze Custom Attributes, that we will inevitably end up talking about Custom Attributes as well.

Let’s jump right in!

Datatypes

So we got to see a glimpse of datatypes when talking about the Default Attributes yesterday, so back at the User Import docs, we saw options String and Boolean.

Every single attribute in Braze, Profile Attributes, Custom Attributes, and more, needs to have a specific datatype. In other words, every data in Braze needs to be one of the available datatypes in Braze, and this data will keep that datatype for all instances of that data.

So for example, first_name is a String. That means for every single user profile in Braze, their first_name attribute will be a String. No exceptions.

Similarly, Custom Attributes follow the same rule that every Custom Attribute data will have a specific datatype, and here on the Custom Attributes docs, they list out the available datatypes in Braze and a brief explanation of each type. Let’s go through these one by one.

Booleans

First, we have Booleans, and yes, that is how you pronounce Booleans.

Boolean data can only have two values: true or false. It’s a simple, yes-or-no datatype, that can be helpful to log some basic, binary data on your user profile. Let’s say on the Nike website, I’m able to become a Premium member. The Nike can create a Custom Attribute called “premium_member” with a Boolean datatype, and log a value of “true” for my user profile.

By the way, to clarify some terminology here, Boolean is the “datatype”, premium_member is what we call the “key” or “field”, and true is the “value”. Even though we can’t see the datatype here on the user profile page, we know that premium_member is a Boolean bc it has the value true, and also, if you navigate to Data Settings → Custom Attributes, you can see the data type for all your Custom Attributes here.

For Default Attributes, just like how they have reserved names for each data, they also have reserved datatypes that cannot be changed, and you can see that list on the User Import documentation linked video Day 3.

Numbers

Moving on to Numbers! Numbers is exactly what you think it is. They are numbers. Typically, in computer science, they separate integers and decimals, but Braze decided to keep things simple and just create a datatype called Numbers.

Braze provides some great examples of attributes with a datatype of Number, like shoe size, waist size, or number of times a user has viewed a certain product feature or category.

Those are all useful information Nike can track on my user profile to send personalized recommendations or gauge my interest on a specific product.

Strings

Next, we have Strings. Now Strings are probably the most commonly used datatype, and I personally see it as the default datatype. Strings are any group of alphanumeric characters, that’s letters, numbers, and/or symbols. So you can see why it’s the most commonly used datatype. Name, ID, or any general information could be a String.

Here, I have my favorite_shoe entered as a String, which has a value of “Nike Air Max 1”, these slides looked very comfortable on the Nike website.

Time

And the last datatype for today is Time. Mother Nature, Father Time. Time is actually technically also a String, but it’s a String in a specific format: ISO-8601, which if you watched video Day 3, you know that it’s the year-month-date time format.

Even in the User Import page, it says that dob has a datatype of String, even though it’s actually a Time.

Time data can be very helpful in many ways; you can celebrate a user’s birthday, the last time a user purchased an item, the date that they became a premium member to celebrate their anniversaries, and the possibilities are endless.

Thank you!

So Boolean, Numbers, Strings, and Time: those are the main, basic datatypes.

Now there are other datatypes we see here, like Arrays, Objects, and Arrays of objects. I like to call these Advanced Datatypes as these 3 datatypes are basically different groupings of the original 4 datatypes we went over today.

On the next video, we will spend more time talking about these Advanced Datatypes.

That’s it for Day 4.

If you have any questions, please share them in the comments. We’re happy to help! 🙏

If you learned something from this video, please subscribe for more awesome Braze videos in the future!

Thank you for watching, and see you next time!

allan@fornowmarketing.com

fornowmarketing.com