Sitecore

Sitecore: Programmatically adding contacts to a list

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<ContactData> contactList = new List<ContactData>();
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<ContactData> contactList = new List<ContactData>();
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}

Sitecore: Sharing field data across languages

This is the third in a series of blog posts covering everything you should need to know for building a multilingual website in Sitecore.

Part 1 - Adding languages for a multilingual site
Part 2 - Translating text in your presentation

In the first two parts to this series I concentrated on how you can setup Sitecore to allow different language versions of content to be entered. In some instances though your content will contain fields which should remain the same across all language versions. This could be for product sku's, dimensions of an object or possibly image fields.

To make a field share it's values over multiple languages, in the template definition tick the shared checkbox against the field.

It's worth noting though that as well as making the field value the same across all languages, it will also be shared between all versions within the language.

Although the interface gives the impression that a field can be the default (versioned), unversioned, shared or unversioned and shared. The value of the unversioned checkbox actually become meaningless once shared has been ticked and there really are only 3 options; Versioned, Unversioned and Shared.

Sitecore: Translating text in your presentation

This is the second in a series of blog posts covering everything you should need to know for building a multilingual website in Sitecore.

In Part 1, I covered how to add a language to Sitecore so that content editors could create content in that language. In this post I'm going to show you how to create a dictionary in Sitecore so that hard coded text in your presentation or views can be translated into the relevant language.

Creating the dictionary

A dictionary is created within your content tree and then referenced from the <sites> section of your web.config file.

Somewhere outside of your sites home node (I like to create a settings folder for this sort of thing), create an item of type "Sitecore/templates/System/Dictionary/Dictionary Domain". This will be the root item of your dictionary.

Under your root dictionary item you will be able to create Dictionary Groups and Dictionary Entry's. I find a good way to organise your dictionary is to create a group for each letter of the alphabet and then sort your entry's into each of these based on the key name.

A dictionary entry consists of a Key and a Phrase. The key is the value that will be referenced in code to lookup the entry, and the phrase is the translation that will be returned.

Translations for each language are created using regular language versions of content.

Configuring the site to use the dictionary

For a site to use the dictionary you need to add a dictionaryDomain to the sites node. Below is an example of the default website site updated to use a dictionary called "My Dictionary"

1<site name="website" virtualFolder="/" physicalFolder="/" rootPath="/sitecore/content" startItem="/home" database="web" dictionaryDomain="My Dictionary" domain="extranet" allowDebug="true" cacheHtml="true" htmlCacheSize="50MB" registryCacheSize="0" viewStateCacheSize="0" xslCacheSize="25MB" filteredItemsCacheSize="10MB" enablePreview="true" enableWebEdit="true" enableDebugger="true" disableClientData="false" cacheRenderingParameters="true" renderingParametersCacheSize="10MB" />

Translating text in your view

Now that your dictionary has been set up you can start translating text in your views.

The following line of code will lookup the dictionary entry based on the key and return the phrase for the current context language.

1@Sitecore.Globalization.Translate.Text("dictionary key")