Adomain <-> click_through_url

[jihonrado]

Hi,

First of all, I want to thank you for this amazing library and documentation.

I ran into the very same problem described here and found that issue to know how to solve it.

Now, my understanding is that DoubleClick's "click_through_url" field has the same purpose that the OpenRTB's "adomain" field. So, if I am not wrong, it would be nice to modify DoubleClick's mapper to map these two fields. What to you think?

Best,

[opinali]

I wish I could use that; unfortunately the spec is clear that adomain has to contain domain names, not full URLs. But AdX is more strict, it requires the full URLs for filtering and publisher blocks. I was tempted to put that in the adomain anyway, but that would be abusing the spec.

I have already suggested to change this in the spec, and there's other feedback showing that some people actually put full URLs in adomain, with the effect that others have to "clean them up to try and put them into true 'adomain' format".

It was a hard choice, but we try to err in the side of spec compliance. I realize how inconvenient this is for fields that are as important as click_through_url (AdX will reject your bid if you don't send that), as opposed to so many other "nice-to-have" fields. We're considering some alternative solution, e.g. a configuration flag to ask the library to take some liberties with the spec where that would help to make a more complete mapping without extensions.

Meanwhile, the DcExt extensions should be a good workaround; they are in-memory extensions only (no JSON support) but that shouldn't be a problem for the native->OpenRTB usage scenario. You can also go to the openrtb-users list and add your vote to fix adomain ;-)

[jihonrado]

Thanks @opinali for the clarification. I imagined there was a reason for that. I will try the approach described in #13 then.

Best,

[opinali]

Some news here: I forgot to update this bug, but in the end we decided to go you way. Since 0.9.3, this library already supports mapping of adomain->click_through_url, but we support both domain names and URLs: you can put a domain name like "bidder.com" and it gets mapped to an URL like "http://domain/com" like AdX wants; or you can provide a full URL instead, which is mapped without change. The latter of course is non OpenRTB-compliant for now, but I hope we can get this improved in the spec.

[jihonrado]

Thanks for the update @opinali. We upgraded the library a few weeks ago and removed our custom implementation as now this is supported.