User Documentation
API Clients & Integrations
Scenario Recipes
Table of contents
“Recommended For You” Rows
Introduction
With a particular emphasis on customizable filters, our advanced recommendation algorithms curate rows on your viewers' homepage that align precisely with their unique preferences. They can enjoy a homepage that truly reflects their taste, ensuring each video suggestion is a perfect match.
You can add a "For You" row, along with other personalized rows such as a "New Releases For You", a row with content from user's country or area, and much more thanks to our flexible filters.
Scenario Setup
In the Recombee Admin UI, navigate to the Scenarios section and choose Create Scenario.
- Enter a Scenario ID. The Scenario ID depends on what content will be shown in the particular box (what Filter will be applied), so it can be e.g. top-picks-for-you, local-content-for-you, or new-releases-for-you
- Choose Recommendation type - Items to User (as we want to personalize the content based on the user’s watching history)
Logic
The Logic defines the behavior of the recommendation engine.
- Choose the video:personal logic type from the Video models to recommend assets based on the user’s watching history
Based on the assetType parameter you can choose what type of assets will be returned (e.g. movies, series, episodes, or movies and episodes, etc.).
Using the excludeAlreadyWatched parameter you can either allow or filter out the titles the user has already watched.
Filters
New Releases
You may want to create a Latest Releases For You row and show only assets added in e.g. the last two weeks.
- Navigate to Filters tab and Add first filter
- Find Recent items and click on +
- Specify which property in your Items catalog specifies the publish date
- Enter maximal age in days
Local Content
You may want to create a Local Content For You row and show only the content specific to the user’s country, state, city, etc.
- Navigate to Business Rules section and Create Rule
- Enter a Rule name, such as "User Local Content"
- Choose Rule Type - Filter
- Choose Entity Type - Items
- Assuming the user has a country user property and the assets have a countries item property, that contains the countries to which the asset is local, the ReQL expression can look like this:
context_user["country"] in 'countries'
After creating the Filter, you can apply the rule to your Scenario in the Filters tab.
If the locations of the user and the videos are specified by latitude and longitude, you can use the Geographical ReQL functions, such as earth_distance.
Available Assets (Global Settings)
You always want to recommend only movies, series, and episodes that are currently available to watch for your users. Therefore you need to apply a Filter rule to allow only such assets.
As it would be tedious and prone to error to add this rule to all the Scenarios, this rule shall be added to the Global Settings, so it is always applied everywhere.
The particular filter depends on how you specify such assets in your catalog:
- If you have a boolean property that marks the asset as available you can use the predefined Available items [boolean] rule.
- If you have a timestamp property that specifies when the asset is published (becomes available) you can use the predefined Published items rule.
- Or if you have a licensing window (start date, end date) you can use the predefined Items within their licensing window rule.
- In every other case, you can create a custom filter rule to allow only the available assets according to your own logic.
Boosters
Boost Content Picked by the Editorial Team
You may want to boost the assets the editorial team picked as preferred.
If you export this flag from your CMS as a boolean property, you can apply the Boost editors' picks predefined rule in the Boosters tab of the Scenario.
You can find the appropriate level of boosting using the Preview.
Requesting Recommendations
There are three ways to get recommendations.
- No-Code Widget - create a No-Code Widget using the visual editor in the Admin UI.
- Widget SDKs - use the SDK for a Carousel, Grid or Feed to display the recommendations in the design of your choice. Use the Recommend Items to User endpoint when initializing the widget.
- API SDK - request the Recommend Items to User endpoint of the Recombee API using an SDK of your choice.
For more information navigate to the Integration tab of the Scenario in the Admin UI.
In order to request content for multiple rows with a single API request, use the Batch endpoint and put the recommendation requests inside it. Set the parameter distinctRecomms in order to deduplicate the assets among the rows.