Dan Matthews
Mar 20, 2013
  3145
(1 votes)

EPiServer 7 and Live Monitor

Many of you have probably used the funky Live Monitor with EPiServer CMS 6 (otherwise known as EPiServer Trace). If you come to deploy it in EPiServer 7 and you are creating your own site using the web site template rather than starting with the Alloy templates, you may have a little difficulty in getting it running. It spins up, but no visits are ever tracked. Why is this? Well, Live Monitor works by injecting some tracking javascript into the page which, in turn, calls a handler URL to record the ‘visit’. To inject that tracking code, you need to use a new EPiServer feature called ‘Required Client Resources’. In the Alloy templates, this is done for you. However, if you started from scratch with the EPiServer web site template, you won’t have this and will need to add it yourself.

To get it all working, take a look at the following article on the SDK:

Live Monitor Configuration in EPiServer 7 (SDK)

Annoyingly, if you followed the instructions in the documentation on World rather than the SDK, then you’re probably tying yourself in knots and not getting anywhere – it’s not updated yet. If you’re interested in the background…

In EPiServer 6, getting that tracking javascript code injected could be troublesome because it requires EPiServer to be able to intercept, parse and modify the pages coming through. In an ideal world, the tracking code should be automatically inserted by EPiServer hooks that are added when you deploy Live Monitor. However, this often didn’t work because of the parsing requirements. The workaround was therefore to insert the tracking code manually by adding an ASP.NET control to the page called ‘VisitTracker’. Indeed, this is what the CMS 7 documentation on World currently tells you to do:

Live Monitor Configuration in EPiServer 7 (World) - DO NOT USE THIS!

Unfortunately, if you try and do this in EPiServer 7 then you’ll soon find out that ‘VisitTracker’ no longer exists (resulting in various missing tag prefix errors at runtime). The reason for this is that because EPiServer 7 uses this new Required Client Resources technique, there is now a much better way to inject the needed tracker javascript and it doesn’t have anything to do with manually adding controls.

Simply put, this new technique will scan all assemblies for classes that are marked with an attribute for required client resources, then it will call the classes to generate the resources (it’s an interface it calls) and insert the resulting resource references at a defined point on the page. Where these resources are inserted depends on an ASP.NET control called, unsuprisingly, ‘RequiredClientResources’. In Alloy, this is pre-set up for you in Root.Master:

<EPiServer:RequiredClientResources RenderingArea="Header" ID="RequiredResourcesHeader" runat="server" />

The solution is very simple then – simply include the RequiredClientResources controls where needed. You should add two… one in the Header and one in the Footer. The link at the top of this article will take you from here.

Mar 20, 2013

Comments

Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Vulnerability in EPiServer.GoogleAnalytics v3 and v4

Introduction A potential security vulnerability was detected for Optimizely Google Analytics addon (including EPiServer.GoogleAnalytics and...

Bien Nguyen | Sep 20, 2023

Overriding Optimizely’s Content Recommendations Block to Implement Custom Recommendations

Introduction The Content Recommendations add-on for Optimizely CMS dynamically recommends content from your site tailored to the interests of each...

abritt | Sep 13, 2023 | Syndicated blog

Developer contest! Install the AI Assistant and Win Bose QC45 Headphones!

We are thrilled to announce a developer contest where you have the chance to win a pair of Bose Headphones. The goal is to be the first developer t...

Luc Gosso (MVP) | Sep 7, 2023 | Syndicated blog

Send Optimizely notifications with SendGrid API, not SMTP

If your Optimizely site already sends transaction emails through an email platform API, why not do the same with Optimizely notification emails?

Stefan Holm Olsen | Sep 6, 2023 | Syndicated blog

Optimizely Configured Commerce Custom POST API

Introduction When creating custom API controllers for an Optimizely B2B project it’s possible you’ll want to create POST calls. Following the...

Dylan Barter | Sep 6, 2023

Using Google’s structured data to improve your SEO in Optimizely's B2B Configured Commerce

Introduction Following proper markup standards for search engine optimization is imperative for the success of every website. While Optimizely B2B’...

Dylan Barter | Sep 6, 2023