Sitecore 7.2 DMS - remove users from plan

Question

I'm preparing some small engagement plan in sitecore 7.2. It has few states, few conditions and some actions - simple plan for abandoned basket. So I would like to track customer and if he/she leave some products in his/her basket send him/her email notification after some time.

The issue I have is connected with removing users from my plan. If user reaches some state - like didn't react on any email I want to remove him - so then in future I can enroll this user again. I used predefined action "Remove visitor from current plan" - before the last state. But when it is executed, user is not deleted, remains in current state (before action) and in analytics database has "state" column set to 2. I do not know why - if it is desired behavior or if I have something wrong.

And may be little general question - if it is good to remove users from plan or if it would be better to store them in some final states and if it is necessary then move them to some init state.

Thanks for any reply. Petr

Answer 1

I think your problem is with how you're viewing the "visitor". I think you're confusing "removing" the visitor from the current plan with "resetting" them to another state. The fact is that the visitor is NOT going to removed (deleted) from the data, instead its going to reset their state to something else... i.e. like they haven't participated.

Answer 2

I was solving this issue with Sitecore support and finally they have solved it.

This issue was already solved in Sitecore 7.5 so it is connected only with "older" versions.

Sitecore has provided us a fix (Sitecore.Support.386028.dll) - the problem was cause by "UpdateVisitor" in AutomationWorker where was missing check if the automationStatesRow is deleted or detached. If anyone faces the same issue, try ask Sitecore for the fix.

• The issue was even bigger that I had originally thought. The automation states are processed in some batches and if the batch contains one "remove user from plan action" it breaks processing and whole batch remained in inconsistent state in db. So the database started to fill up with these broken data.

Thanks to anyone how wanted to help! Petr