Can anyone provide me with working example how to show analytics (Visits, Page views, Page views per visit, etc) for logged users? As I understand there is no OOB solution, so I've tried to implement flexible dimensions, but didn't find any good examples and failed.
First of all you have to identify your logged in contact by calling the Sitecore.Analytics.Tracker.Current.Session.IdentifyAs() method, see more details here. When the contact logs in you can use their username to identify them upon the successful login.
Note, that the identification and authentication are separate unrelated events. Contacts are identified against the xDB and authenticated against the authentication mechanism used by the website.
When the contact identifies, it is saved to xConnect with a known identifier based on the information passed into theIdentifyAs() method: Identifier, Source and
IdentifierType will be set to ContactIdentifierType.Known (it is set to ContactIdentifierType.Anonymous for anonymous contacts). Then you can use IsKnown property on the Sitecore.XConnect.Contact that returns true if a contact has any known identifiers.
If you want to track some custom events for the logged in users to then use them for reporting needs you can add user interactions by calling the client.AddInteraction() extension method. I have given an example here.
If you want to extend the contact with your own custom data then you can create custom contact facets, read more here.
In order to implement your custom report with flexible filtering by logged in and not users, of course, you will need to define your custom dimensions and metrics, read more here.
Related
I am working on a beta-stage writing tool SaaS that is built with NextJS, React, and Django REST. As I’m gaining some user base, I am starting to research on introducing a premium plan to the mix using Stripe.
As most other SaaSs, I will have a subscription-based premium plan which grants access to premium-only features. However, even after days of research, I am still lost how this is commonly implemented in Django/Backend. Here is what I’ve thought of so far, but again, I am not sure if it’s the best/common way to accomplish this.
User model has a ‘premium’ field which is either True or False
Whenever user clicks on a premium-only API call, Django will check if user is premium or not to decide whether to make the actual API call. I currently have a '/user/me/' route which returns basic user information as API GET call.
Upon successful stripe payment, stripe redirects user to the success_url. Then, somehow I will detect when user lands on success_url and then set that user’s premium field to True.
I know this is not the ideal way, because I already see lots of issues/hurdles:
How will I set ‘premium’ field back to False after user’s payment stops
How can I ‘detect’ stripe’s payment to set user’s premium field
Is this feature supposed to be implemented with Stripe customer objects instead? I would appreciate any guidance on where I should be looking for solutions.
If you use subscription on Checkout Session (low code solution), you can add additional key-value pair data such as premium: true in metadata and subscription_data.metadata fields when creating a subscription.
Once the payment is completed, those metadata will appear in checkout.session.completed and customer.subscription.updated webhook events, which you can then set the user as premium in your own database.
A customer object in Stripe can have multiple subscriptions, so this feature will be implemented on subscription object instead.
In Amazon Cognito's User Guide, in the page “Configuring User Pool Attributes”, there is this paragraph (with added emphasis):
“If your application does not require a username, you do not need to ask users to provide one. Your app can create a unique username for users in the background. This is useful if, for example, you want users to register and sign in with an email address and password.”
I want to do precisely what the paragraph says: while users sign up, create in the background a custom user ID for them myself, because I need these IDs to follow a specific semantic format, that embeds tenant context into the IDs (something like “T01234#U01234567“, meaning “user U01234567 inside of tenant T01234”).
The users won't know of their custom ID, they will feel as they've signed up (and later signed in) with their emails (or through 3rd parties like Facebook and Google, if possible in this set up). But in the background I will create these custom IDs and store them in their username attribute in the User Pool.
The reason I want to store these iDs specifically in the username attribute is because it is un-mutable and unique, but most important because I will need to query Cognito's APIs (ListUsers, AdminListGroupsForUser, etc.) using these custom IDs as filter, to give my customers some user management capabilities. The username attribute is the parameter for these APIs. Therefore, I cannot use User Pool custom attributes here, since they are not accepted as parameters of these APIs.
The reason I post this Question is because, while the documentation recommends this as a possible setting, there is no specific information on how to set the user pools and sign up flow to support this specific use case.
What is the general settings layout of this? To start with, in the option “How do you want your end users to sign-up and sign-in?”, what do I have to put there in the scenario I described? If anyone can give any additional pertinent information, it would be very helpful, as the documentation feels somewhat opaque.
Thank you very much for those who've read this.
You probably will need to deal this in your frontend.
When your user start the sign-up process, you will need to generate the username based on your requirements and send the request to Cognito User Pool using that generated username + e-mail.
For Cognito User Pools this will be transparent because in the request it will receive the username, the password and the user e-mail. Off course you will need to allow login with e-mail and password.
If you don't want to do this in the frontend you can create a backend with public access that accepts a unauthenticated requests and performs this task directly in Cognito User Pool.
I would like to access other users public data to show in my website when they configure the page by their username/id.
It means I will create an app on FB/Instagram side and with the help of this app's access token I would like to fetch public data of other user.
Is this scenario valid now? Earlier it was possible but I am not sure now with changes in policies. Even the documents are not clear enough which can say it's possible or not?
Has anyone tried this out recently?
Users: Only data of users who specifically authorized your App is available, depending on the authorized permissions. It does not matter if data of user profiles is public or not, you have to get permission from each user separately.
Pages: If you want to get data of pages you don´t own, you have to go through a review process with your App to get access to "Page Public Content": https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/review/feature/#reference-PAGES_ACCESS
That´s for Facebook, about Instagram you can just hit the docs (as well): https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/business-discovery
My number one recommendation, in this case, is Facebook API or Instagram API from Data365. I may be considered biased since it is the tool I work for, but it is really a reliable tool you can get public profile data by users ID or username.
Of course, you can use the official Facebook/Instagram APIs for searching all public objects (post, user, page, event, group, place, check-in). But note, the official API has a number of restrictions. Andyrandy has already described them in his answer. Compared with official APIs, we do not have such restrictions.
Besides, our APIs provide such unique features as gender and age recognition (via face photos) along with identification of post reactions that give a competitive advantage in obtained analytics. Data365 APIs also enable developers to create monitoring tasks for a one-time or auto data update. And above all, we do not break the law but only provide web scraping within the legal framework.
Our website is using DocCheck, an external authentication provider, to authenticate and identify contacts. We use the DocCheck ID, which comes as the request parameter "uniquekey", as contact identifier, so that the contact, when logging in on another device, can be re-identified. These users are then authenticated in Sitecore via a virtual user.
Tracker.Current.CurrentPage.Session.Identify(Page.Request.QueryString["uniquekey"]);
In addition to that, we're planning an own user management with registration, login etc. The users will be logged in via email address and password. The email address should now be used as another identifier to identify the contacts loggin in with these credentials.
The users should then be able to use both DocCheck and our own login for different parts of our website, so that we have DocCheck contacts and our own users.
Is it possible to combine these two identifiers to identify as one contact?
Thank you and kind regards
Torsten
At the moment you can only use a single value to identify a user within xDB. This is potentially going to change in the future however for now you can only use one.
xDB is just a mongo database so how about persisting an additional collection that contains the relationship between identifiers. An example would be:
CustomContact
- _id: the xDB identifier
- alternativeIdentifiers: [docCheckId, formsAuthId, etc] - if this is indexed the lookup will be quick
Then when you come to identify the user you lookup in your custom collection your identifier, find the actual xDB id and then identify with that.
To find the item in the array look at elemMatch or in:
https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/operator/projection/elemMatch/
and some examples on
https://stackoverflow.com/a/18149149/1065332
On the site that I'm developing we need to track the last visited page for each user (users login to the site). What's the best way to do this? We are already using a custom profile so adding a new field is easy. The site will not have a lot of traffic so updating this field wont be an issue, i think. Are there better ideas? Does sitecore already offers something that we can possible use?
OMS has a "Top Exit Pages" report by default... but that is tracked across sessions, not users.
A good IIS log parser should also be able to give you this information... again, that would be by session (or IP) and not logged in user.
If you really want to get every exit page AND filter by logged in user... what I would do is add a new pipeline processor to httpRequestBegin, and place it after the ItemResolver. Then save the Item.Paths.Path. I would advise against writing this data to the user Profile if you are using the default ASP.NET Profile handler and you have a decent amount of traffic, because it is highly inefficient. Roll your own simple storage solution here, or just dump the data to a log.
My first question would be: Why do you need only the last visited page of the user? What are you trying to determine?
In a lot of cases, you are probably starting down an analytics route, or perhaps even trying to drive some marketing.
If the analytics is what you are going for, you can probably just pop an event out to your google analytics account with the current username as an event variable to allow you to look at analytics by user and by page. Alternatively, you could use the Sitecore OMS/DMS features for tracking all that data and looking at the analytics there.
If you are looking at driving marketing, you probably want to use OMS/DMS, especially if you want to start getting into personalization or engagement plans. OMS/DMS will track user activity, and all the pages they visit, though not by user account. With some customizations, you can probably add that data in, but it will depend on what you are trying to use the information for. The username may not be what is important to you.
If, however, you just want to know what page to send the user back to after logging them in, it would be better to just store that in session or pass as a post parameter if session is not a viable option for you.