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I am trying to use FXM to track user activity and trigger events etc on a mobile app using Xamarin.

Everything is setup in the federated experience manager in Sitecore, although of course it reports that the beacon is not installed because you can't ping a mobile app using a domain name. Because of this limitation you also can't use things like placeholder/content injection but my plan was to handle event and goal registration using the FXM JavaScript API and accept that injecting content from Sitecore will not work.

I have set FXM to the DEBUG log level and using a basic html site I can see the logs being populated with page tracking information so I have validated that FXM works in that scenario. I have also overridden the FXM tracking pipelines and beacon controller to be able to set break points and monitor the "flow" of an FXM request.

What I cannot yet do is see any of these pipelines, controller, logging etc being hit when loading the beacon on the mobile app. I am loading the beacon by adding a WebView to my layout on the android app:

var view = FindViewById<WebView>(Resource.Id.webView1);

view.Settings.JavaScriptEnabled = true;
view.SetWebChromeClient(new WebChromeClient());
view.AddJavascriptInterface(new Foo(this), "Foo");
view.LoadUrl("file:///android_asset/fxm-interface.html");

And then in the html itself I have:

<html>
<body>
    <h1>FXM</h1>
    <p>Host: <span id="fxmHost"></span></p>
    <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.4.min.js"></script>

    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.local-sitecore-host.com/bundle/beacon"></script>

    <script type="text/javascript">

        $('#fxmHost').text(SCBeacon.fxmHost);

        SCBeacon.trackEvent('Page visited', { data: 'Launch', dataKey: 'Activity', xKey1: 'test' });

    </script>

</body>
</html>

What's interesting is that the span with the id fxmHost is displaying the expected output of SCBeacon.fxmHost so I know that the FXM script is being loaded however no call to trackPageVisit?contactId=... or trackEvent is being registered in Sitecore, no requests from the app show up in fiddler either.

So my question(s) are:

  1. Does FXM need to be loaded differently within a mobile app to work?
  2. Has anyone managed to get FXM working on a native or otherwise mobile app
  3. Are there any special configurations withing Sitecore to support this?

Any help much appreciated. Unfortunately upgrading to version 9 and using xConnect is not an option at this time.

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It turns out that the FXM script creates an instance of SCBeacon using a Sitecore domain without a specified protocol i.e. //host. Within the app this was being interpreted as a file request and therefor not handled correctly. I added a custom WebViewClient to my WebView which overrides the ShouldInterceptRequest method, which allows me to intercept POST requests to the FXM services and handle them myself in terms of:

  1. Adding an explicit protocol
  2. Adding a custom sessionId (as this was also blank)
  3. Setting cookies returned in the response (SC_ANALYTICS_GLOBAL_COOKIE & site language)
  4. Mapping app activities to a page structure for the "page" parameter
  5. Passing the contactId (retrieved from the previously set cookie)

Things seem to be working now in that I can see requests hitting Sitecore from the App and data going into xDb but I won't mark this as answered in case anyone out there says "no don't do that, there's a much easier way"

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