With regard to site definitions what is the default value of the enableTracking attribute?

Question

This may seem like a really obvious question, but I just wanted to make sure as I couldn't find any documentation on this particular attribute.

Within the site definitions <site> there is an attribute called enableTracking:

For example:

<site name="service" enableTracking="true" virtualFolder="/sitecore/service" physicalFolder="/sitecore/service" />

I am wondering if this attribute is defaulted to true if it is not present?

Does it determine if an individual site has XDB tracking enabled / disabled? Or does it have another purpose?

Answer 1

It looks like the default setting for a site is true if not set. This will of course be overridden by the global setting.

namespace Sitecore.Analytics.Tracking
{
    public class TrackingSiteContext
    {
        public TrackingSiteContext (SiteInfo siteInfo)
        {
            this.SiteInfo = siteInfo;
        }

        public bool EnableTracking
        {
            get
            {
                bool flag = true;
                bool result;
                if (bool.TryParse (this.SiteInfo.Properties["enableTracking"], out result))
                    flag = result;
                return flag;
            }
        }

        protected SiteInfo SiteInfo { get; set; }
    }
}

Answer 2

I asked the following question to Sitecore support and the answer was:

This setting literally defines whether analytics tracking is enabled for a site or not.

For some sites tracking can be excessive functionality, therefore this parameter allows disabling it in a handy way on a site level.

You can enable it globally but disable for specific sites by this setting.