For developers: Collect data through the connector

NOTE: Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud (DEC) was renamed to Sitefinity Insight as a part of the Sitefinity 13.0 release. However, Sitefinity CMS and its documentation prior to version 13.0 continue using the former name - Digital Experience Cloud.

Tracking within Progress Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud is accomplished by three major types of reporting:

• Send sentences that describe user actions on the website.
• Send additional data (metadata) related to the objects or subjects in the tracking scenarios.
  Sending of metadata may be as a part of the sentence or as a separate request.
• Send subject mappings, that is, relate two subjects that the system has recognized as representing one and the same user.

Progress Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud connector uses the sentence data model to collect data. The sentence is the data unit that holds the information of what user activity was completed on the website, by whom, and when. The sentence is comprised of:

• Subject – the executor of the action (the cloud uses the executor’s ID)
• Object – the entity which action is executed upon (again some identification of the object is applied)
• Predicate – the name of the action (the verb)
• Additional (key or value pairs of) data about the subject or the object (optional).

Following is an example of a sentence sent by the connector to the Progress Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud when a user visits a certain page:

Subject: User Id
Object: Page URL
Predicate: Has Visited
SubjectMetadata: FristName, Email
ObjectMetadata: PageTitle, IsPagePersonalized

A separate metadata submission request, as mentioned above, may be of two kinds – subject and object. The model of the subject metadata request contains the subject identifier and a collection of key and value pairs, holding the data related to this subject. The model of the object metadata request contains the object identifier, the predicate on which the tracking occurred, and of course – the collection of key and value pairs holding the data related to the object.

SubjectMetadata: FirstName, Email
ObjectMetadata: PageTitle, IsPagePersonalized

Very often, when users first arrive on a website, their identity is unknown. To track user actions, the Progress Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud connector maintains a tracking ID of the user until the moment the user's identity is recognized by the connector. This most often happens when users log in their accounts. At the moment of logging, a subject mapping is sent to the Progress Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud and thus Progress Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud knows that all records associated with this specific tracking ID are related to the actions of the ID of the user who is logging in. From this point on, the connector uses the user ID for associating actions to this user. Once the user logs out, the connector gets back on using the tracking ID already related to this specific user.