Managing the Sitecore xDB Contact Card without requiring the Tracker

The Normal Way

When working with a user profile in Sitecore 8, we generally get the contact card by using Tracker.Current.Contact.  Of course if the tracker is null we will call Tracker.Start(), and of course that would also mean the Contact is null so we would also need to call Tracker.Identify().

This works out well in most situations since the tracker is maintained across the session.  If you don’t have a session though this could mean a big headache.  You would normally need to create a Session and an HttpContext, then create and push a tracker into the stack.  While this is not excessively resource intensive when you are doing a lot of calls it can add up quickly.

Getting the Card

There is an alternate way to get the card though.  You can use the ContactManager to load the contact by username, if there is not a contact identified by that username then it will return null and you can then create a new Contact and insert it.

var user = Context.User.Identity.Name;

if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(user)) return null;

var contactManager = Factory.CreateObject("tracking/contactManager", true) as ContactManager;

var contact = contactManager.LoadContactReadOnly(user);

Saving Updates

If you are updating this contact keep in mind that it will not persist across the session so you will need to flush it to the database before the end of the request.  This is also done with the Contact Manager by calling FlushContactToXdb and passing the contact, then by calling SaveAndReleaseContact also passing in the contact. 

var manager = Factory.CreateObject("tracking/contactManager", true) as ContactManager;

manager.FlushContactToXdb(contact);

manager.SaveAndReleaseContact(contact);

Submitting your Session

Just to be on the safe side of things it is not a bad idea to submit your context.  You may be thinking that that requires a session.  Fortunately Sitecore can create a very lightweight session context for this use.  You can use the SessionContextManager and call GetSession passing in the contact id, an empty guid, and two Boolean true values.  Once you have the session you can call Submit on the SessionContextManager and pass this session in.

var contextManager =

    Factory.CreateObject("tracking/sessionContextManager", true) as SessionContextManagerBase;

var session = contextManager.GetSession(c.ContactId, Guid.Empty, true, true);

contextManager.Submit(session);

While this solution is not perfect, you can expand on this solution to build a robust contact manager that does not depend on there being an active session.