processItem Pipeline in Relation to FXM

I've talked a lot recently about the processItem pipeline and how it can be extended to automatically associate site visitors to Sitecore profiles without having to tag all of your page items in the content tree, in fact it was the theme of my Sitecore Symposium talk in Orlando.

What I have discovered fairly recently is that FXM (Federated Experience Manager) uses the exact same pipeline to register goal conversions, page events etc. on external sites. If you haven't heard of FXM before, essentially FXM allows you to do 'Sitecore like things' on sites that are not running on Sitecore i.e.

• Track user activity
• Inject Sitecore managed content into external sites
• Personalise content injected from Sitecore on external sites

Not an exhaustive list but you get the point. It's not a silver bullet however and it's far from perfect but let's say you want to use the FXM APIs in a non-website context, let's say mobile apps, to track user activity and goal conversions or do the same kind of profile mapping that I talk about in my Symposium talk. Well, because FXM uses the processItem pipeline within a page tracking context you absolutely can, even though FXM has no back-end UIs that will allow users to manage tracking in a non-website context.

So how exactly? Well firstly when you create an external site in FXM you end up with a 'Domain Matcher' item, which defines mappings between the external sites host name and the FXM site it relates to and language mapping rules. This allows you to tell Sitecore how to intepret FXM requests from external sites with the freedom to define how the external site provides that information, could be in the request headers for example.

As you begin to set 'filters' for the external site using the FXM version of the experience editor (not available for mobile apps of course), for example where the external site address being tracked equals a specific page then register the goal conversion 'subscribed to newsletter', filter items are created as children of the domain matcher. The goals to register etc. are then stored against the tracking field of the child filter item.

The RegisterEventsForMatchedPagesProcessor within the tracking.matchpages pipeline defined in Sitecore.FXM.config then basically iterates over the child filter items that match the current FXM external site tracking request, creates an instance of ProcessItemArgs and passes it into the processItem pipeline.

So again, it would be a relatively trivial thing to extend either the FXM tracking.matchpages or processItem pipeline to read from a repository of rules based profile map items to associate the current visitor with Sitecore profiles even within a non-Sitecore and non-website context.

Happy profiling!