Cobalt Website Page Events without a session

Joshua Krebs

I have a use case for recording a Page Event for UE tracking when a user hasn't logged in. In particular, a non-subscriber can search and "preview" content and we want to track that via Page events.

If a user doesn't have a valid session id, there is an InvalidOperationException thrown.

Is there any way to use the current "eventing" features to accomplish this?

Andrew Gerber

Joshua,
No, I don't believe this is possible
I believe that we tried this before and found that it wouldn't work for whatever reason. The Events contract requires a session ID. You could talk with the Co_Events_Tech team for more info.

However, it MAY be possible to spoof the session ID... I don't believe it has to be a real session (don't quote me on that), and it MAY not even need to be a GUID. This might be good enough for usage tracking purposes, as you don't really care if the user has a session in that case.

Whenever a user visits any page on Cobalt and they don't have a "Website session", one is created for them and that sticks with them for the remainder of the time the user's browser is open. I'm almost 100% sure that the same Website session sticks with them even after the user signs on. You might be able to use that cookie value as the session ID for usage tracking.

It looks like the "real" session guid that is used for tracking isn't created until the user actually signs on, but I don't see why we couldn't create that GUID when we create the Website session and then carry it over to when the user signs on (if that makes any sense)?? That way you could use the actual guid that would be used when the user is authenticated. Come chat with me if you need more info about that point.