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Over the last few months, I've been working away on a Kentico 9 EMS project. Very exciting indeed! Really pulling out all the stops on trying to make an amazing site in an EMS framework alongside the whole team at Syndicut.

This week, I had to develop a custom built form to grab some user's information. Unfortunately, I was unable to use Kentico's Form Builder due to the requirement where the details had to be submitted to an external API, as well as utilising a custom design.

One of the many benefits you get out-the-box from using the Kentico Form Builder is the ability to log marketing activity to the Contact Management area to store information on the visitors who view and interact with your site. By building a custom form, I was losing losing key data, such as: First Name, Last Name Email Address and Telephone No. - The base key criteria of turning an anonymous visitor to a person with some context.

To avoid this loss of data, I created a method that uses the CMS.OnlineMarketingContext class to allow you to manually update the current visitor information:

/// <summary>
/// Creates/Updates a contact in Kentico's Contact Management system.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="firstName">Visitors first name</param>
/// <param name="lastName">Visitors last name</param>
/// <param name="emailAddress">Visitors email address</param>
/// <param name="businessPhone">Visitors business phone number</param>
/// <param name="allowContactOverwrite">Overwrite existing contact fields with new information.</param>
public static void SetMarketingContact(string firstName, string lastName, string emailAddress, string businessPhone, bool allowContactOverwrite = false)
{
    ContactInfo existingContact = OnlineMarketingContext.GetCurrentContact();
            
    // Update an existing contact or create a new one if no existing contact exists.
    if (existingContact != null)
    {
        existingContact.ContactFirstName = firstName;
        existingContact.ContactLastName = lastName;
        existingContact.ContactEmail = emailAddress;
        existingContact.ContactBusinessPhone = businessPhone;

        if (allowContactOverwrite)
            existingContact.Update();
    }
}

My code only shows a handful of fields that I am updating, but the "ContactInfo" class provides access to many more.