Custom event and attribute management

This reference article covers managing custom events and attributes and properties, as well as an overview on data type comparisons.

Adding custom attributes, custom events, and products

You can manage custom attributes, custom events (and their properties), and products (and their properties) from the respective pages under Data Settings:

• Custom Attributes
• Custom Events
• Products

To add a custom attribute, event, or product, go to the respective tab and click + Add. Give it a name (and for custom attributes, a data type) and click Save. This will enable tracking on it.

Managing properties

Once you have created a Custom Event or Product, you can click 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 trackable, you must ask your developer to create it in the SDK using the exact name you used to add it earlier. Or, you can use Braze’s APIs to import data on that attribute. After that, the custom attribute, event, or other will be actionable and apply to your users!

Blocklisting custom attributes, custom events, and products

To stop tracking a specific custom attribute, event, or product (e.g., accidental creation during testing, no longer useful), search for it in the Custom Attributes, Custom Events, or Products tab, then click Blocklist.

To prevent collecting certain device attributes, see our SDK guide.

Once a custom event or attribute is blocklisted:

• No data will be collected regarding that event/attribute,
• Existing data will be unavailable, unless reactivated,
• Blocklisted events and attributes will not show up in filters or graphs.

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

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 may re-enable any blocklist event or attribute at anytime.

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. Click on the drop-down in the Data Type column to choose.

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 (i.e., 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.