Sitecore

Screencast - Installing Sitecore Forms Extensions

Monday, January 04, 2021

Layer One - Team Lead - Andrew Schwabe

One of the first steps to leveraging the power of Sitecore marketing tooling is predicated on the existence of xDB contacts. The easiest way to begin creating contacts is is by capturing visitor form fills. Check out this screencast to learn how:

Transcript

Hi everyone Andrew Schwabe here at Layer One. I hope you are doing well today. I've got a quick video for you on installing Sitecore forms extensions and hooking up form fills xDB contact information, so let's get started. The first thing we're going to do is go locate the Stiecore forms extension GitHub repository. Once on that page you can scroll down to the readme section. There's a download link in here we're going to click that downloads. The version with that we're going to install today is dependent on the target version of Sitecore. In our case, we are using Sitecore 9.3. I'm going to select Sitecore 9.3 and then go ahead and download the zip directory to a known location. Once the download is completed, we're going to log in as a Sitecore admin in local, locate the desktop view. Once in the desktop view, we're going to click start, development tools and installation wizards. In your case, you're going to want to click the upload package button and select the zip directory that you just downloaded from the Sitecore forms extension GitHub repository. Once it's uploaded, click next and work your way through the wizard. I have already done this for this install. It takes a few minutes, so I didn't want to waste our time here. For those of you who have to install it, go ahead and pause the video now. Once you once you get to the view that says restart, Sitecore client is when you're going to pick the video back up. So restart Sitecore client and then will move over to Sitecore Launchpad. I want to locate the form that I want to update, so I'm going to go to forms. I have a test contact us form here and open that up. There are four inputs on this form. First name, last name, email address and message. I'm going to start with first name. I'm going to select that field from the form, slide all the way down to the advanced settings, and then the piece I'm interested in most is value provider, so this is what we just installed with the Sitecore extension package. You'll notice a drop down here a folder called Experience Profile. Let's expand that and see what things we have here. So in here what? These are our mappings from the form field input. So in our case first name to data in a xConnect contact. So these are all of the out of the box options. In our case, we've got first name which falls under personal information and select first name. Another field that's of interest to you potentially is this checkbox down here? So what this checkbox does is it will. If selected it will pre populate the form for known contact. So say I've already filled the form out on your site, I'm a resolved contact in xDB. If I go to this form, should it pre populate? That's what this is asking here. In my case I do not want to pre-populate so I'm not going to check that checkbox. I'm going to just apply and continue on to last name. Same process for last name. Under personal information there is last name, select it, apply email address, same process a little bit different. However because email does not fall under personal information. It's a top level entity. Select email and apply. Now message, for instance, we are not going to save this for the reason of out of the box like or doesn't have a really good place to put this. We could abuse one of the fields that are already there, but I highly advise against doing something like that in order to actually capture this data correctly and store it with the contact. I would suggest doing some custom development. Adding an additional facet to the xDB contact, adding the additional value provider and hooking it up that way so you have a custom implementation to capture this custom information. So I'm going to cancel out of that because we're not going to make any changes, and then I'm going to go to submit. Last thing we need to do is add our submit action. Also, with Sitecore forms extensions, not only do we get the value providers, we also get some new submit actions and one of them is identify contact. So I'm going to select that a window will open and I'm just going to open this dropdown. So what this identifier field is asking is how do we identify the contact in xDB to figure out if it's the same person or same contact that one exists already. So in our case we want to do something unique. We've had great success with email address, so I'm going to select email address, click OK. Then I'm just going to move this up to the top and apply. So what this will do? This submit action is if there's no contact with that email address, it will create a new one. If there is a contact with that email address, it will find that contact and it will update first name and last name based off the new values that are entered. So I'm going to click apply here and save and just like any other format modifications, you're going to want to go into Sitecore content tree click publish. If this isn't on a page already, you can go ahead and add it to a page and start filling it out and you will start seeing. xDB contacts showing up under Experience Profile. I hope this video is helpful for you and I thank you for your time.

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