Learning@Sitecore

In the previous blog , we discussed what is the xConnect Client API withpurpose and how we can start configuring a custom application to able to connect it.   In this blog, I am going to show how we can extract the interactions and contacts using the same application.   Recently, I came up with a requirement where I need to fetch the interactions from xDB for specific duration for some reporting purpose. Although we can access to those Shard database directly, BUT Sitecore best practises says we should always use xConnect Client API while dealing with xDB.   To do so, we need to setup a independent application and can be hosted on IIS server which is authorized to connect to xConnect thru secure channel.   Please note, you must have ssl certificate for your application in order to connect to xConnect API. Working with Interactions and Contacts I am assuming you have gone thru my previous blog , where we were able to connect to xConnect Client API.   I will be co...

Introduction Before we go deep into this topic, lets understand what xConnect is? And the basic terminologies around it.   xConnect is a service layer, which is actually sitting between xDB collection database and the external systems. The external system could be any API or Web Application which can connect to xConnect.     Now if you see closely to the databases which are being created while installing Sitecore, then it includes databases with name like {InstanceName}_Xdb.Collection.Shard0 and {InstanceName}_Xdb.Collection.Shard1.     These 2 databases comprises of xDB collection  and ShardMapManager is a central database that manages the mapping between sharding keys and the corresponding shard databases I.e Shard0 and Shard1 in our case.   If you checkout the tables in one of the shard database, then it will consists below list of tables, showing few of them:   The highlighted tables are the important ones. Sitecore stores all data relate...