Data Flow - Sitecore WebForms For Marketer (WFFM) - Part I

In this Blog post series, I will discuss about the Data Flow of Sitecore 8 - from front-end website to MSSQL Databases


1) Data Flow - Sitecore WebForms For Marketer (WFFM) - Part I
2) Data Flow - Sitecore WebForms For Marketer (WFFM) - Part II

Setting Up :

1) Create WFFM Form

2) Add newly created WFFM form to Item Presentation Details

3) Publish

4) View it in Front Website

5) Empty Forms Reports
As you can see from the below image, WFFM reports does not have any records. So, we will start with a fresh copy of WFFM.

Data Injection :

Enter Data to WFFM form fields and click "Submit"

Data Flow :

1)  Front Webpage to Session

User enters data into wffm form and click "Submit" button
You can view the data going from front webpage to server by using Fiddler tool (see Screenshot below)

2)  Session to MongoDB database

Sitecore migrate data from Session to MongoDB only when user session is ended.
By default session end time will be 30mins. You can adjust that time by adding "timeout" parameter to <forms ... > tag as below

    <authentication …> 
        <forms name=".ASPXAUTH" cookieless="UseCookies" timeout="2" />
    </authentication>

Refer : https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/345947

• Empty MongoDB - Before processing any data

As you can see in the below image, there is still no MongoDB collection related WFFM, inside the analytics database

• After processing WFFM form data to MongoDB

When the data was processed to MongoDB at the end of the user session timout, a new collection (FormData) is created inside the analytics database.

Below image displays how data is stored into MongoDB "FormData" collection

That is it for the first part.

In the next part, we will discuss some issues/bug with WFFM module and fixes, when migrating content from MongoDB to MSSQL "reporting" database as well as how these data is processed into MSSQL database tables.

see you soon!!