I recently got caught out when trying to patch some include files within the FXM configuration. In the end the fix was simple – thanks support 🙂

For certain recent features the config is now setup with folders per feature. An example would be:
– app_config
– – include
– – – fxm
– – – – Sitecore.FXM.config
– – – – … etc
– – – Sitecore.Diagnostics.config
– – – … etc

Now say you want to patch the config within Sitecore.FXM.config, in order for the patch:before and patch:after logic to work correctly you need to create a new folder which has a start letter greater than Fxm. An example would be /app_config/include/zzz.

The reason being, Sitecore looks to process all the files in /app_config/include first, then all the folders e.g. /app_config/include/fxm etc.

In the scenario I was interested in i.e. patching the FXM pipeline:

You need to remember to include the group tag to ensure the nesting is correct. The final patched config you’d need would be:

Happy patching 🙂

We are starting the migration of a site to make use of Sitecore FXM (federated experience manager) and wanted to do a very quick test as to how it would play with our existing sites javascript. The key question was are there any glaringly obvious issues when we drop in the beacon?

There are a few options – a common one would be to add the beacon to a qa / uat site and test there. However, what if the content isn’t as up-to-date – is there another solution?

The approach below is a bit hacky so don’t rely on this for your final integration testing! However, on the plus side, it’s very quick to see things in action 🙂

1. Select the site you want to test on. Nominally: www.sitecore.net
2. Fire up a new instance of Sitecore on your dev machine (8.1 if possible) with the host: fxm.www.sitecore.net
3. Create a new FXM site entry and set the host to be fxm.www.sitecore.net
   1. Note, we will change this later
4. Through the FXM experience editor add a hello world placeholder and control to your page
   1. This should create you an item in the tree under: ‘/sitecore/system/Marketing Control Panel/FXM/www sitecore net’
5. Open up the new placeholder you added in the tree and note the selector. This can be anything you want – for the sitecore site update this to be say ‘#Form1 > div.shell’ (without the ‘s)
   1. To find the value to use, dive into chrome developer tools, right click the element you want and choose ‘copy XPath’ or ‘copy CSS path’ – I found css was easier to work with as you can target specific elements, not array entries
6. Update the primary domain entry added in step 3 to be www.sitecore.net
7. Publish the lot
8. Visit www.sitecore.net in a browser and note nothing has changed
9. In the chrome console run the following script:
   1. var script = document.createElement(‘script’); script.type = ‘text/javascript’; script.src = ‘//fxm.www.sitecore.net/bundle/beacon’; document.head.appendChild(script);
   2. If the script here fails, make sure the ‘ are proper single quotes, not funky curly ones.
10. You should see in the network tab a new request to the beacon – the response should be json containing all the data needed for rendering your changes to the page
11. Check the page – in theory anything set in step 4/5 should now be applied to the page

A word of caution – if you are interested in how the placeholders work you can always view: Presentation details -> Final renderings. However be careful, don’t ok (ie save) once you’ve reviewed them as the format saved back into the field isn’t compatible with FXM.

Since the launch of Sitecore 8, Sitecore have enabled a neat feature that opens up some rather interesting possibilities in terms of how you can track user behaviour and personalize non-sitecore sites.

The federated experience manager (FXM) is now fully integrated into the product. To configure you need to specify the remote site domain, take the tracking beacon and install into markup on the remote site. The beacon is simply a script tag with its url pointing back to your Sitecore application e.g.:

<script src=”//###.url.com/bundle/beacon”></script>

Within the experience editor you then have the ability to create virtual placeholders for the pages. Into these placeholders you can then add: sublayouts, renderings etc. Much like you would on regular Sitecore pages.

The items you create that define the placeholders and filters for the external sites live in ‘/sitecore/system/Marketing Control Panel/FXM’

The scenario I was testing involved simply adding some text after my H2 tag in my external site, purely for some ‘hello world’ eqsue testing.

This was all done through the Experience Editor. The css selector is highlighted below. If you dig into the presentation details for the item you can see how it’s been configured with the sample rendering and datasource ‘/sitecore/content/Home/After’

Note, I ran into issue when editing the presentation details here as you were forced to select a layout. I’ve been in touch with Sitecore around this, if you select any layout the beacon didn’t appear to return the correct markup.

Great, I can now publish the site and see my after content showing on an mvc app:

However, if I visit any of the pages in my site the same text shows. In my scenario I only wanted the text to show on the contact page, not about, faq etc.

Within the experience editor you can create ‘page filters’. These allow you to build a bit more structure into the setup. Having created one of these, you then need to nest the ‘Element placeholder’ under it and publish:

Note, I couldn’t find a way to nest the placeholders under the matcher rules within the experience editor.

The matcher rules allow a good variety of options for restricting things, and as with Sitecore you can always add your own 🙂

It’s only early days for FXM but I’m sure we can expect some pretty neat things to come!

Some follow on queries and next steps in testing things out:

• How to scale FXM
  • Which boxes receive the most load
  • Could we have a specific FXM set of delivery boxes?
• How can we pass custom data back through the beacon?

For more info see https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore%20experience%20platform/federated%20experience%20manager