How to programmatically update item on master database from Content Delivery MVC Sitecore 8

Question

I have the following scenario on Sitecore 8.2 (MVC Project) I have a scaled Sitecore (CM/CD), and after the user hits a page on CD Server, it needs to update a Sitecore Item, that contains a field called Counter and this must be republished as well, triggered by the code, at the same time.

I know it's possible to perform this operation using Javascript (Sitecore Services Client), but I'm afraid of using that due to Security. Which would be the best approach to perform that?

Note that, I cannot use .GetDatabase("Master")

Thank You

Answer 1

Assuming you have xDB enabled you could perhaps use MongoDB to store your data instead.

There look to be a few approaches for doing this:

1) custom page events:

This looks like your best bet, Here are Sitecore's official docs for this: https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/developing/marketing_operations/events/register_a_page_event_programmatically

You can then do something like:

MyPageDataService service = new MyPageDataService();
service.MyPageDataService("Goal", "Donated", "£100", string.Empty);

Some examples from around the web of doing this: https://pramisoni.wordpress.com/2017/02/27/sitecore-analytics-tracking-on-click-of-events/ https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SitecoreV3/Handling+Custom+Events;jsessionid=A59AE33C36B1AB36ED6906785D67547C

https://briancaos.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/sitecore-register-page-events/

2) a page aggregation table:

This looks more complex to do:

https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/setting_up_and_maintaining/xdb/server_considerations/walkthrough_creating_a_rate_page_custom_aggregation

Answer 2

If you have xdb enabled see Adam Seabridge's post

I think I would keep this data in a separate sql table. Sql has an atomic increment operation which is something you'll want for this. You also probably don't want that field to be editable in any way by a content editor. Then you would be dealing with a connection string to decide where to pull/write the data based on the environment. I do generally try to avoid a custom db outside of Sitecore but I'm not seeing a great alternative.

As far as I know there is no atomic increment option for a Sitecore field. You might be able to get away with a custom api using a field if you lock before reading the number of times a donation happened and then update it but it just seems like a lot of hoops to go through to edit the master db to then publish that up to the web db. Putting this in a field would also give me cause to pause when it comes to anything that would by default update the master db (submitting a test donation while previewing the page).