Analytics

I have recently had the interesting and challenging task of upgrading a Sitecore 7.2 installation to the newest Sitecore 7.5. In the project we were extensively using Analytics code which had to be updated. That is where the fun began. In our solution we had to manipulate users in engagement plans. Users had to be added, removed or moved between engagement plan states from the code. In order to do that we had to change the code to adapt it to the new API. Here are the changes. ...

This post will show how to create an Engagement plan rule that uses custom fields. The idea is that the users have custom fields on their profile related to newsletter distribution groups. The goal is to create an engagement plan where we have a rule condition saying something like this : The engagement plan using this condition has a user in the initial state, a condition validator and a second state where the user will be put if the condition validates. An email will be sent after the validation (in this case). ...

Sitecore DMS stores IP addresses as a varbinary(16) in the Visits table in the analytics database. This is just perfect but it is impossible to read the IP addresses as a normal human being. To help out with this I found the following SQL function which can convert an IPv4 address to a binary. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.fnBinaryIPv4(@ip AS VARCHAR(15)) RETURNS BINARY(4) AS BEGIN DECLARE @bin AS BINARY(4) SELECT @bin = CAST( CAST( PARSENAME( @ip, 4 ) AS INTEGER) AS BINARY(1)) + CAST( CAST( PARSENAME( @ip, 3 ) AS INTEGER) AS BINARY(1)) + CAST( CAST( PARSENAME( @ip, 2 ) AS INTEGER) AS BINARY(1)) + CAST( CAST( PARSENAME( @ip, 1 ) AS INTEGER) AS BINARY(1)) RETURN @bin END So let say that you want to delete all visits from localhost, simply run the following SQL statement using Sql Server Management Studio. ...

Today I was asked by a customer to filter out their internal IPs from all DMS reports. There are two approaches for obtaining this. Either very simply add the IP addresses to the Sitecore.Analytics.ExcludeRobots.config as excludedIPAddresses. But I did not like this approach. The customer editors are not robots, so this is messing up domain entities.. Instead I took a different approach and simply wrote a new processor for the startAnalytics pipeline. ...

For this post to make sense I will need to create a user story. I will not try to create a standard scenario instead I will create a scenario that is easy to understand and easily applicable to this post. The problem we want to solve is to present some content to the user that is relevant to the content that the user is looking at in any given time. ...