Sitecore Experience Profile - Identify and Merge Contact when submitting WFFM form - Part 2

In this post I will show you how you can use a WFFM custom action to identify and merge a contact and of course I will provide you with a fully documented code that you can find it in GitHub, in case you missed the previous post I recommend you to go back and check it, it will give you an overview about the problem that we are trying to overcome here.

  

First thing first, A special shout-out to Jonathan Robbins for providing a great code for identifying and merging contacts which I used here, Following are  a great post by Jonathan that describe in details the identifying and merging of contacts:

https://jonathanrobbins.co.uk/2016/01/20/how-to-identify-and-merge-contacts-in-sitecore-xdb/

So, Sitecore give you the ability to identify a contact when submitting a WFFM form with the following two conditions:

1. The visitor is a known user and it is logged In.
2. You use “Update Contact Detail” as one of the save actions on the submit button of the form

But what if we the contact “visitor” is not a logged in user?!

In this case you may think of doing the following as many blogs posts advise:

1. Add “Create User” save action, then
2. Add “Login User” save action, then
3.  Add “Update Contact Details” save action

Of course, most of the client will reject this solution!!

When searching I found many posts that handle part of this problem, so what I did is combining pieces together to provide a save action that will give you the ability to identify and merge contacts.

One may ask what is identifying and Merging contacts?

Identifying: is the process of capturing the information that a contact may submit or provide through his visit to the site, like email address, name or any other information.

Merging: is the process of matching if the current contact has been in the site before, if yes, then lets merge this contact with the one that we already know in our xDB.

I want to mentioned that this code can be found on GitHub and a marketplace module (complete package of Sitecore items and code ) has been submitted and waiting for approval. So, I will show you how to create a custom WFFM action to update contact details (identify and merge) for logged in and non-logged in users.

Following what you need to do:

1. Duplicate the WFFM action “Update Contact Details” and name it “Custom Update Contact”.
2. In the new item, Update the field “Factory Object Name” to /sitecore/wffm/actions/CustomUpdateContact
3. Now, you need to use the following configuration file:




4.  Now you can use the following updated code, which is the original taken from the custom detail action:




5. Make sure to use Contact Factory created by Jonathan in the post provided at the beginning of this post.

Complete solution can be found in GitHub, I hope it will help.