Skip to main content

Enabling Sitecore DMS

I have been working more with Sitecore as of late and one of the things I wanted to do was work with DMS. Every time I went into a DMS functional area though all I could get was "Analytics is disabled" message. So it was time to start plugging away to figure out why. The install steps are not clear, or at least they were not to me. Here are the steps I took to getting DMS enabled:

1) First check out John West’s blog for some things to check

If you are missing the Sitecore.Analytics.config file you probably missed the database install step of getting DMS up and running. You need to make sure you download and unzip the database zip file that holds the config files and database files for the Analytics database, for your version. Once you have that download here are a few steps you may have missed.

2) Move the config files to <sitecore site>\Website\App_Config\Include

3) Add a connection string settings to the ConnectionString.config file (<sitecore site>\Website\App_Config) with the name “analytics.”

At this point try and go into engagement analytics. The disabled message should have gone away. It may even work for you at this point. For me I still had database errors about invalid objects. This was an easy one though. When I copied the database connection string I forgot to update the database name to the analytics database.​

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Uniting Testing Expression Predicate with Moq

I recently was setting up a repository in a project with an interface on all repositories that took a predicate. As part of this I needed to mock out this call so I could unit test my code. The vast majority of samples out there for mocking an expression predicate just is It.IsAny<> which is not very helpful as it does not test anything other then verify it got a predicate. What if you actually want to test that you got a certain predicate though? It is actually pretty easy to do but not very straight forward. Here is what you do for the It.IsAny<> approach in case someone is looking for that. this .bindingRepository.Setup(c => c.Get(It.IsAny<Expression<Func<UserBinding, bool >>>())) .Returns( new List<UserBinding>() { defaultBinding }.AsQueryable()); This example just says to always return a collection of UserBindings that contain “defaultBinding” (which is an object I setup previously). Here is what it looks like when you want to pass in an exp

Anatomy of Sitecore Business Rule - Macros

In previous posts, we talked about  field syntax and the basic structure of business rules . This time we are going to dive into macros in the business rules. Macros are used as part of the business rule syntax. The syntax looks like this and calls for 4 parameters. [Property to set, Operator/Macro, AdditionalParameters, Display text]. When I first started working with business rules the difference between operator and macro was confusing. To add to this confusion some of the out-of-the-box macros are named with the term "operator" (like ListOperator who's configuration points to a class called ListMacro and the class implements IRuleMacro). Anything under the path /sitecore/system/Settings/Rules/Definitions/Macros should be a macro and should implement IRuleMacro. Macros have the follow characteristics: They inherit the IRuleMacro interface The interface requires this execute method void Execute(XElement element, string name, UrlString parameters, string value)

Experience Profile Anonymous, Unknown and Known contacts

When you first get started with Sitecore's experience profile the reporting for contacts can cause a little confusion. There are 3 terms that are thrown around, 1) Anonymous 2) Unknown 3) Known. When you read the docs they can bleed into each other a little. First, have a read through the Sitecore tracking documentation to get a feel for what Sitecore is trying to do. There are a couple key things here to first understand: Unless you call " IdentifyAs() " for request the contact is always anonymous.  Tracking of anonymous contacts is off by default.  Even if you call "IdentifyAs()" if you don't set facet values for the contact (like first name and email) the contact will still show up in your experience profile as "unknown" (because it has no facet data to display).  Enabled Anonymous contacts Notice in the picture I have two contacts marked in a red box. Those are my "known" contacts that I called "IdentifyAs"

Excel XIRR and C#

I have spend that last couple days trying to figure out how to run and Excel XIRR function in a C# application. This process has been more painful that I thought it would have been when started. To save others (or myself the pain in the future if I have to do it again) I thought I would right a post about this (as post about XIRR in C# have been hard to come by). Lets start with the easy part first. In order to make this call you need to use the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel dll. When you use this dll take note of what version of the dll you are using. If you are using a version less then 12 (at the time of this writing 12 was the highest version) you will not have an XIRR function call. This does not mean you cannot still do XIRR though. As of version 12 (a.k.a Office 2007) the XIRR function is a built in function to Excel. Prior version need an add-in to use this function. Even if you have version 12 of the interop though it does not mean you will be able to use the function. The

Anatomy of Sitecore Business Rule - Field Syntax

In the previous post, I talked about the general anatomy of Sitecore Business Rules . In this post, we will dig more into the rule itself and how you can set one up. In the previous post, I mentioned the "special syntax" a rule has in the "text" field. Let's dig more into what this is. This is broken into 4 parameters, not all of which are required.  Property to set , defines the public property of the class where we want to assign the value coming from the content author input Operator or Macro , the operator we want to use to evaluate the condition. In this case, this will be a string comparison operation Additional Parameters , this parameter will depend on the type of macro that we use, this could be a default text value if we are using the default macro,  it could be a default start path if we’re using the Tree macro ( root=/sitecore/content/myitem )  – think of it like setting a field source when we’re building a template in Sitecore. A full l