Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I got a fun support ticket recently, for a client on Sitecore v8.1 whose analytics processing had stopped working. Their outstanding queue of raw analytics data that needed to be aggregated was slowly growing, and some functionality which relied on the existence of recent analyics data had stopped working. Trying to fix this caused me to look at two issues which are related to how Web Forms for Marketers data is processed in analytics – and these seemed like issues that other people who do support work might need info on...
Recently a client of mine came up with some requirements that involved submitting data to the Web Forms for Marketers database via code. Having done a bit of Googling, I came across a Stack Overflow answer on the same subject which seemed to offer a solution. Implementing this code did indeed allow submitting data – however it didn't trigger Save Actions. So while the data will go to the configured WFfM data store, emails or CRM integrations won't get triggered.
That was an issue for my client, who wanted to have email notifications as well. So starting from the Stack Overflow responses, I looked into how the WFfM save actions can be correctly triggered via code.
I hit an issue recently where it was necessary to get direct access to the Web Forms for Marketers database. The code needed to do some custom processing of previous form submissions in a Sitecore website, and it needed to process so much data that the public APIs for WFfM were too slow to use. Slightly annoyingly, the connection string for WFfM is not added to the the standard .Net
config element, but is stored in the custom provider configuration in WFfM's forms.config file:
