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Reputation: 461

Storing custom temporary data in Sitecore xDB

I am using Sitecore 8.1 with xDB enabled (MongoDB). I would like to store the user-roles of the visiting users in the xDB, so I can aggregate on these data in my reports. These roles can change over time, so one user could have one set of roles at some point in time and another set of roles at a later time.

I could go and store these user-roles as custom facets on the Contact entity, but as they may change for a user from visit to visit, I will loose historical data if I update the data in the facet every time the user log in (fx. I will not be able to tell which roles a given user had, at some given visit).

Instead, I could create a custom IElement for my facet data, and store the roles along with a timestamp saying when the given roles were registered, but this model may be hard to handle during the reporting phase, where I would need to connect the interaction data with the role-data based on timestamps every time I generate a report.

Is it possible to store these custom data in the xDB in something else than the Contact collection? Can I store custom data in the Interactions collection? There is a property called Tracker.Current.Session.Interaction.CustomValues which sounds like what I need, but if I store data here, will I be able to perform proper aggregation/reporting on the data? Any other approaches I haven't thought about?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 898

Answers (1)

Dmytro Shevchenko
Dmytro Shevchenko

Reputation: 34591

CustomValues

Yes, the CustomValues dictionary is what I would use in your case. This dictionary will get serialized to MongoDB as a nested document of every interaction (unless the dictionary is empty).

Also note that, since CustomValues is a member of the base class Sitecore.Analytics.Model.Entity, this dictionary is available in many other data classes of xDB. For example, you can store custom values in PageData and PageEventData objects.

Since CustomValues takes an object of any class, your custom data class needs some extra things for it to be successfully saved to and subsequently loaded from MongoDB:

  1. It has to be marked as [Serializable].

  2. It needs to be registered in the MongoDB driver like this:

    using Sitecore.Analytics.Data.DataAccess.MongoDb;

// [...]

MongoDbObjectMapper.Instance.RegisterModelExtension<YourCustomClassName>();

    This needs to be done only once per application lifetime - for example, in an initialize pipeline processor.

Your own storage

Of course, you don't have to use Sitecore's API to store your custom data. So the alternative would be to manually save data to a custom MongoDB collection or an SQL table. You can then read that data in your aggregation processor, finding it by the ID of currently processed interaction.

The benefit of this approach is that you can decide where and how your data is stored. The downside is extra work of implementing and maintaining this data storage.

Upvotes: 1

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