Sitecore - Creating an admin menu item

13 March 2018

If your building a Sitecore admin application, your going to need to link to them from the Sitecore start screen/launch pad.

To create a menu item on Sitecores start screen:

Log into Sitecore and switch to the core db
Open content editor and navigate to /sitecore/client/Applications/Launch Pad/PageSettings/Buttons
You will see groupings for each of the sections that appears on the start screen/launch pad

Add a new Launch Pad-Button item to the section you want it to appear in
Give it a name, icon and link

Your button now appears on the start screen

Sitecore xDB - How to get count of interactions

12 April 2017

If you need to rebuild your Path Analyzer maps, Sitecore have a knowledge base article on how to do it here - https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/766858

In the FAQ section it gives some info on how long you should expect it to take

What it doesn't tell you though is how you find out how many interactions your site has to process. The data is stored in analytics collection in your Mongo DB, so go there an then run...

1db.getCollection('Interactions').find({}).count()

Sitecore: Programmatically adding contacts to a list

1 March 2016

From Sitecore 8 the EXM module now uses lists to manage mailing lists rather than roles against a user. The built in Subscription form control that comes with EXM has also been updated to add contacts to this list. However the subscription control remains WebForms only, so if you implementing an MVC solution you're going to need to write your own. There's also many other scenarios where you may want to programmatically create and add a contact to a list.

Under the hood, contact lists aren’t even a list at all. Rather they are actually just a Facet on the Contact record that contains the list id's for all the lists the contact is a part of. You can see this by looking in the contacts collection in the analytics mongo db.

Or in the Contacts table in the Reporting SQL db.

If you wanted to add a contact to a list you could in theory just add the relevant tag to the contact record like this:

1public void AddContactToList(Contact contact, Item list)
2{
3   using (new SecurityDisabler())
4   {
5      contact.Tags.Set("ContactLists", list.ID.ToString());
6   }
7}

But I wouldn't. The problem with this approach is your going to miss out any logic that will handle updating the counts of contacts in contact lists. Best to use one of the provided list api's instead.

Adding a contact to a list

Sitecore has a ContactListManager object that has a method to associate contacts with lists. All you need to do is create an instance of it and pass it a list of contacts.

1public void AddContactToList(ContactData contact, ContactList list)
2{
3    ContactListManager listManager = Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.CreateObject("contactListManager", false) as ContactListManager;
4 
5    List&lt;ContactData&gt; contactList = new List&lt;ContactData&gt;();
6    contactList.Add(contact);
7 
8    listManager.AssociateContacts(list, contactList);
9}

Removing a contact from a list

Just like adding a contact, there's also a handy method for removing one too.

1public void RemoveContactFromList(ContactData contact, ContactList list)
2{
3    ContactListManager listManager = Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.CreateObject("contactListManager", false) as ContactListManager;
4 
5    List&lt;ContactData&gt; contactList = new List&lt;ContactData&gt;();
6    contactList.Add(contact);
7 
8    listManager.RemoveContactAssociations(list, contactList);
9}

What's that ContactData object?

Chances are you don't have a ContactData object (Sitecore.ListManagement.ContentSearch.Model.ContactData) and instead probably have a tracking contact (Sitecore.Analytics.Tracking.Contact). For the purposes of adding and removing a contact from a list, all your ContactData object really needs is its identifier, which you can do with the following:

1public ContactData ConvertContactToContactData(Sitecore.Analytics.Tracking.Contact contact)
2{
3    return new ContactData()
4    {
5        Identifier = contact.Identifiers.Identifier
6    };
7}