Guests are anonymous users who have not registered and have not logged in. There are several different strategies you can use to track anonymous guest users:
Maintain a session for each guest, using ATG’s session tracking, but do not attempt to gather any additional profile information.
Maintain a profile for each guest in memory, using implicit profile properties, but discard the profile when the guest’s session expires.
Maintain a profile for each guest in the database, using a persistent cookie to identify anonymous users on subsequent visits. Note, however, that most sites have large numbers of casual or infrequent users. If you maintain a profile for each person who visits your site even once, your database resource requirements may be very heavy.
To maintain persistent profiles for guest users, perform the following steps:
Set the
persistentAnonymousProfiles
property of theProfileRequestServlet
totrue
. With this setting, a new profile is created in the database for each anonymous visitor.Set the
persistAfterLogout
property of theProfileRequestServlet
to true. Setting this property ensures that a profile is created in the profile repository immediately after an anonymous user logs out of a Web site.Enable auto-login by setting the
autoLogin
property to true in theuserprofile.xml
file. (For more information, see Auto-Login with Cookies.)Configure your profile repository so that no properties are required (check the repository definition file to make sure that the
required
attribute is not set to true for any properties).
By default, the Personalization module does not send a login event when it creates a persistent profile for an anonymous visitor. To have the system send a login event in these circumstances, set the sendLoginEventForNewPersistentAnonymousProfiles
property of the ProfileRequestServlet
to true
.
For information about controlling access for guests, see the Controlling Anonymous User Access section in this chapter.