Special extra actions

Close session

Sessions are often closed based on a specific URL or a string in the response, such as Order Confirmation. When the event fires, the session fragment is closed, and the other session events are evaluated, after which the session is marked for long-term storage or removal.

A session close event is designed to artificially terminate a visitor's session fragment. These events are useful in two scenarios:

• If the visitors to your website perform the same business transaction multiple times in a single user session, you may desire to have the business transaction tabulated one time only as a session event.
• If your web application is supporting a group of customer service representatives who are constantly repeating the same business transaction on behalf of a phone customer, then you may desire to have the business transaction that is counted once per user session.

When these instances occur, the session should be forced to close, and a new session fragment should be initiated. Any additional hits that are associated with the session ID for this session are added to the new session and assigned the new internal Discover session index identifier.

• No session data from the original session is preserved.

Clone and close session

When configuring a session to close, you can optionally choose to clone the session attributes that were accumulated in the original session. If extra hits arrive carrying the same session ID as the original session, then a new session is created, and the session attributes values from the original session are added to it, as well as the new hits. The new session is assigned a new internal Discover session index identifier.

Discard session

When a session is marked for discard by an event, the session is deleted when the session closes. Since the session is not archived for storage, it is not indexed for search and is not retrievable.

• Pages in discarded sessions are not counted. Pages are counted as a session-end event, and all event processing in the session stops when the discard action is executed.
• Hits arriving subsequent to the discard session event action are not evaluated for events.
  Note: Any events that were triggered before the session is discarded are retained in the reporting database. Discover recommends testing sessions for discarding in the first hit of the session.
• Session discard events can be configured to be reportable, but you cannot search for or drill-down into these events.
• If the discard session event is configured to fire on the last hit, the session is counted as a session for reporting purposes by default, even though the pages are not counted. To prevent the session being counted, you must either:
  1. Move the discard session event to fire on an earlier trigger
  2. Add the Session Count event as a condition for the firing of the event in which the session is discarded.

If you licensed Unica Discover, setting a session to be discarded automatically forces the event to be sent to the Event Bus. Unica Discover database search requires updating when sessions were discarded, so this configuration is required.