Events

Learn more about events in Visier.

Overview

Events happen at a specific moment in time to a specific individual. In Visier, events happen to subjects.

A specific data record within an event is an "occurrence"; for example, a Compensation Payout occurrence represents a specific compensation payout (like a bonus payment on February 15, 2021). Each occurrence has record values that describe the event, such as the event date, the employee ID that the event occurred on, and the payout amount. These describe what happened, when it happened, and who it happened to (Employee-1 received a bonus payout of $4000 on February 15, 2021).

Tip: To learn more, take the Visier University eLearning course: Understanding Visier's data architecture.

Data schema

Each analytic object has different data schema requirements based on the object's attributes. For example, a subject called Pet may have the attributes Name, Breed, and Age. To load data for Pet, the data file must have columns for Name, Breed, Age, and EventDate (required for loading data).

To get the schema for an object, do any of the following:

  • You can use the Direct Data Intake API to retrieve the schema for any object in your production environment. For more information, see Direct Data Intake API.
  • Download the Application Definition and refer to the Display Name, Data Type, and Data Format columns. For more information, see Download the Application Definition.

After you know the data format for the object you want to load data into, you can send data files to Visier. For more information about data files, see Data File Guidelines. You have many options for sending data to Visier. For more information, see Data In.

Should I create an event?

An event is always connected to a subject. An event occurrence may or may not change the state of its associated subject member. For example, a pay change event can change an employee's total compensation, whereas an employee survey event doesn't change any of the employee's existing attributes. Because of this relationship, you should consider if and how an event should update the attributes of a subject.

Tip: Before creating a new object, check whether your Visier solution already contains the event you want. To find all the events in your solution, do any of the following:

  • In a project, on the navigation bar, click Model > Analytic Objects. You can then filter the list of objects by events and review the list.
  • Download the Application Definition and refer to the Events sheet. For more information, see Download the Application Definition.
  • Use Visier APIs to retrieve all events. For more information, see Data Model API.

If you're creating new objects for your analytic model, you might wonder when to create an event as opposed to a subject, overlay, or internal comparison. If your data meets any of the following guidelines, an event is probably the right object for your data.

  • The data observes transactional behavior that happens to an entity at a particular time instant.

For example, let's say you want to analyze the compensation changes for your employees. Compensation changes are transactional because they happen at a specific time instant to a specific employee. In this scenario, there are a few events you could create depending on the data you have available. You might create a Compensation Payout event to record all bonuses, commissions, normal salary, and overtime paid to employees. You could also create a Pay Change Event to record all salary changes like annual merit adjustments, move-related adjustments, or placement-related adjustments.

After you determine that you want to create a new event , you can create the event in a project in Model > Analytic Objects. For more information, see Create an Event.

Next steps

Now that you have a stronger understanding of events, you can move on to creating and configuring events in your analytic model. For more information, see Create an Event.

You can also continue learning about the analytic model by exploring more topics. For more information, see Understand Visier's Analytic Model.