Creating a content test for a nested component doesn't work as expected

Question

I am hoping someone can lead me in the right direction. I am trying to create an A/B content test. I have a page which has a carousel (a rendering) that has a data source which points to folder that contains many individual carousel items. Each carousel item has a few fields: image, heading, sub heading, and link. What I am trying to do via an A/B test is swap between 2 different images on one of the carousel items. All of the blogs that I have read seem to test content when the content is part of a page template and not a piece of content rendered via a component.

There are a few issues that come up when creating my test:

The first issue is once I create the content test I cannot get back to it. If I try to load it from "Experience Optimization" I get a 404 which makes sense I guess because the test item is not a page, it's a piece of content on a component of the page.

The second issue, if you ignore the first issue, is the page never serves up variants of the content. It always shows the latest version of the content.

I must be doing something wrong because having an A/B test which swaps out an image in a carousel seems like it shouldn't be this difficult. I have tried using the Sample Workflow with the "Approve with Test" with no luck.

I can get it to work if I create a component test but I don't like having to create a clone or a copy of all of the items just to make a change to one of them. Seems overkill to me.

To summarize, I want to have one of my carousel slides have two versions which it serves up via a test within Sitecore. Any thoughts?

I have tried on Sitecore 8.1 and 8.2.

Answer 1

For your scenario, unfortunately, the answer is that you should use a component test. This does involve duplicating the datasource item (and any other items you want to change related to it).

Page test - usually used for when you move components about or change them on the page Component test - usually used when you're testing the content of a component (which is your case)

It sounds like the component test you set up is working. While this may not be a solution for you, I would suggest reworking the component itself. Rather than having a carousel component which then generates the slide markup and points to an item which then points to the slide items. Make each slide a component which can be placed in the carousel via a placeholder. This way you can run component tests directly on each slide.

With regards to the page test you set up, it could be that you need to publish the relevant items. Creating a test doesn't do any publishing (you think it would).