One of the new features in Sitecore 7.5 was the xDB, a new analytics database that rather than using SQL Server was Mongo based. If your main job is as a Sitecore dev, like me this may be the first time you've ever had to use Mongo, or a least the first time you've ever had to commercially use it.

Installing Mongo DB is a relatively painless experience, Mongo provide a decent enough guide to installing on Windows. Half way through you may be wondering why its running in a console window, but eventually you get to instructions for setting it up as a service.

However there are a couple of gotchas:

1. Sitecore doesn't work with the latest version of Mongo. At time of writing the latest version of Sitecore is 8.0 rev. 150427 and Mongo is 3.0. Sitecore however only supports version 2.6.x of Mongo though.
2. None of the installation instructions include any details on authentication. Which while this is fine for your local dev machine is not so great for a live site.

So here's my guide for getting up and running with Mongo DB and Sitecore.

Installing Mongo

First off get Mongo DB installed as a service on your machine. I'm not going to include instructions here for this bit, just follow the guide on the Mongo DB website.

One thing to note though, the Windows installer for Mongo 2.6 will by default install Mongo to C:\Program Files\MongoDB 2.6 Standard\. However the instructions for setting up Mongo include example commands expecting it to be installed in C:\mongodb\

Setting Up Authentication

Once you've got Mongo up and running you'll need to create a user.

1. Open a command prompt and connect to MongoDB
   
   C:\Program Files\MongoDB 2.6 Standard\bin\mongo.exe
   
2. Switch to the admin db by doing
   
   use admin
   
3. Create the user using
   
   db.createUser({user: "admin_mongo",pwd: "your password",roles: [ { role: "userAdminAnyDatabase", db:"admin" }, { role: "root", db:"admin" } ] })
   
4. To verify the user has been created you can use the following commands
   
   db.auth("admin_mongo", "your password")
   db.getUsers()
   

Next update your config file to require authentication by adding auth=true. You will also need to restart the service for the change to take effect.

logpath=c:\data\log\mongod.log
dbpath=c:\data\db
auth=true

Sitecore uses 4 db's in Mongo; Analytics, tracking_live, tracking_history and tracking_contact. We need to create a user in each of them.

Open a mongo shell again, switch to the admin db and connect with your admin login.

Now create each of the users as follows:

use analytics
db.createUser({user: "mongo_user",pwd: "your password",roles: [ { role: "readWrite", db:"analytics" } ]  })

use tracking_live
db.createUser({user: "mongo_user",pwd: "your password",roles: [ { role: "readWrite", db:"tracking_live" } ]  })

use tracking_history
db.createUser({user: "mongo_user",pwd: "your password",roles: [ { role: "readWrite", db:"tracking_history" } ]  })

use tracking_contact
db.createUser({user: "mongo_user",pwd: "your password",roles: [ { role: "readWrite", db:"tracking_contact" } ]  })

Sitecore Connection Strings

All that's left now is to update the connection strings in Sitecore.

The default connection strings Sitecore give you look like this:

The format for a connection string with authentication is

mongodb://[username:password@]host1[:port1]/database

One of Sitecores features is the ability to assign profile cards or profile key scores to pages. As visitors browse the website the profile key scores from each page are added to the visitors profile. Visitors are then assigned a pattern card using N-Dimonsional Euclidean Distance to calculate the closest matching pattern card to the visitors profile.

However before a pattern card is assigned to a visitor they must visit a minimum number of pages. The default for this is set to 3.

Reasons for changing this could be that you actually want to be more certain of a users profile before triggering personalisation this could be to avoid visitors landing pages on the site heavily dictating which persona they initially become profiled as, which in turn could influence personalisation that keeps them in that persona.

Or it could be because you want to lower the number of pages for a more immediate effect.

Whatever the reason to change the default from 3 you need to add the following setting to your config:

Sitecore's Engagement Analytic's engine automatically tracks all page requests. When you assign profile cards to items this also triggers data about a persons interests to start being built up against their visit record, which can then be used to create a personalized site experience.

However what if you want items that are not pages to also contribute to a users profile?

This scenario came about with a recent site we took over that the client wanted to add personalisation too. The site (for unknown reasons) had been built with one product page which looked at a querystring parameter to determine the product information to be displayed (the querystring format was hidden from end users through the use of a URL rewrite). Product data was being stored as Sitecore items allowing them to have profile cards assigned, but as the item was never visited the profile cards values were never applied to the users profile.

After a bit of searching through the Sitecore.Analytics.dll I stumbled across the TrackingFieldProcessor class. This class contains a process function that takes an item parameter an in turn triggers all the functionality for processing campaigns, profiles and events related to the item.

To use it your code would look like this:

This will cause the profile key values to be updated but in the visitor history it still looks like the visitor was only looking at the one page. To change those values we can do this:

Note: I was unable to find any documentation on these functions, or any official way of doing this. Use at your own risk!