How to trigger a goal programmatically out of web request?

Question

When I am importing contacts (within a scheduled job, which is our of request) I want to check few business conditions and if contact matches the condition, I want to trigger a goal for the contact.

The goal will execute rule action on enrolling the contact in the engagement flow.

Is that possible and how to do that?

Answer 1

Goal registration heavily relies on the current session. I am not aware of a good way to properly register a goal outside of actual session, page, and request being available.

To enroll a contact into a specific state in an engagement plan, you can try using this API:

using Sitecore.Analytics.Automation;

// ...

bool success = AutomationContactManager.AddContact(
    contactId,
    automationStateId,
    new Dictionary<string, object>());

This method will return false in the following cases:

• The contact with given ID does not exist;
• The database is unavailable;
• The contact is locked by another process;
• The contact is already in the given state;
• The given automation state does not exist;
• An exception occurs (it will be logged).

To check if a contact is already enrolled in a certain plan, you can use the following code:

Contact contact = ...
var manager = AutomationStateManager.Create(contact);
bool isInPlan = manager.IsInEngagementPlan(planId);