Friday 30 June 2017

Find MongoDB contact and interactions using SC_ANALYTICS_GLOBAL_COOKIE

These days I was working on resolving some issues with Sitecore Analytics and need to find the corresponding contact stored in the Contacts collection database in MongoDB easily.

[Update] 15 Aug 2017: added query output for finding all interactions with provided contact ID.

Sitecore generates the analytics cookie value (in GUID) and stores it in the SC_ANALYTICS_GLOBAL_COOKIE cookie which looks like 95f08e09d56348c9bc285080e91be04b|False. That letters/digits combination is a short, lowered version of GUID which is an important identifier for the contact record that gets stored in MongoDB.

However when you try to find this in MongoDB (using Robomongo which is now Robo 3T, make sure to check the latest version), you will not find it because some parts of the GUID are shifted (i.e. first 8 characters, followed by next two groups of 4 letters).

To make things easier, you could run a C# Program query in LINQPad by pasting the below code in, or visit my fiddle page.

    
    void Main()
    {
       // Value from SC_ANALYTICS_GLOBAL_COOKIE (you can copy the |True or |False part which will be trimed too)
       var guidFromCookie = "95f08e09d56348c9bc285080e91be04b|False".Split(new char[] {'|'})[0]; 
       var mongoDbLUUID = string.Format("{0}-{1}-{2}-{3}-{4}",
                              Flip(guidFromCookie.Substring(0,8)), 
                              Flip(guidFromCookie.Substring(8,4)), 
                              Flip(guidFromCookie.Substring(12,4)),
                              guidFromCookie.Substring(16, 4),
                              guidFromCookie.Substring(20,12));
  
       Console.WriteLine("MongoDB query:");
       Console.WriteLine("db.Contacts.find({" + string.Format("_id:LUUID('{0}')", mongoDbLUUID) + "})");
       Console.WriteLine("All interactions with this contact:");
       Console.WriteLine("db.Interactions.find({" + string.Format("ContactId:LUUID('{0}')", mongoDbLUUID) + "})");
    }

    string Flip(string s)
    {
       var output = "";
       for (var i=s.Length-2; i>=0; i-=2)
       {
           output += s.Substring(i, 2);
       }
 
       return output;
    }

The code will output a query which you can paste directly to Robo 3T.