Implementing domain delegation
Describes how Sitecore Discover circumvents tracking prevention technologies and ad blockers when integrating Discover services in your website.
The implementation of a subdomain when you prepare for a Sitecore Discover integration serves two purposes:
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It allows Discover to circumvent the negative effects of tracking prevention technologies, such as Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and ad blockers.
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It removes the need to authenticate requests to Discover services because they originate from your subdomain.
Tracking prevention technologies and ad blockers block cookies when the domain of a third-party service is different than your website domain. Sitecore Discover uses cookies to anonymously track visitors on your website. To prevent blocking Discover cookies, you can create a subdomain of your website where Discover stores those cookies. This way, Discover cookies are not identified as originating from a third-party domain. After you have set up your subdomain, Discover serves all requests and report events via your subdomain (which might look like rfk.<yourdomain>.com).
Choosing a domain delegation strategy
For services to work as intended, you must choose a delegation strategy to allow Discover to serve traffic on behalf of your website.
The first step in this process is to define a subdomain format. To do this, you choose one of the following strategies:
After you decide on a preferred delegation strategy, inform your Sitecore representative of your choice. A Sitecore representative then configures Discover accordingly, and provides you with the Discover subdomain nameservers or CNAMEs you need to set up your DNS service.
Subdomain delegation
The first possible strategy is to delegate a subdomain like rfk.yourdomain.com to point to nameservers provided by Sitecore.
Here's an example of this strategy as configured in Discover:
CNAME delegation
The second possible strategy is to set up CNAMEs with subdomains such as <somename>.rfk.customerdomain.com. Sitecore provides the CNAME entries.
The following is an example of this strategy as configured in Discover:
Setting up your delegation strategy
When Sitecore has completed the configuration of your subdomains in Discover and provided you with the required NS records, you must add them to your DNS service provider.
After you have added the record, you can verify that your setup is correct by searching for your domain’s NS record or DNS record. You can also run the following command on your terminal:
$ host -t NS rfk.<yourdomain>The following example shows the terminal command to find the NS records for a rfk.riggsandporter.com subdomain, followed by the results of that command:
$ host -t NS rfk.riggsandporter.com
rfk.riggsandporter.com name server ns-1262.awsdns-29.org.
rfk.riggsandporter.com name server ns-1868.awsdns-41.co.uk.
rfk.riggsandporter.com name server ns-450.awsdns-56.com.
rfk.riggsandporter.com name server ns-709.awsdns-24.net.Finalizing the setup
Sitecore performs the final setup to enable the use of your subdomain for accessing all Discover services. When Sitecore has completed the setup of your subdomain information in Discover, you can retrieve the hosts and paths that you need to access various Discover services.