SXA: Personalization not working with Carousel

Question

I have a SXA Carousel component on my homepage I would like to personalize. I added a few rules and associated datasources for each of them.

Then I noticed the same datasource was always used, no matter the pattern card assigned, so I erased the shared datasource of the rendering

Now, the carousel is always white, I can see it displays the right number of slides but they are empty:

Is that because I did not add the slides manually in the experience editor but just added the slides as children of my carousel in content editor ?

Is there another reason ? Please help

Answer 1

I appeared to have the same problem. I have debugged the code, and composite model gets filled properly. I think the problem comes from the dynamic placeholders not being filled with the slides (Page Content renderings).

After de-compiling SXA's source code, I found the following piece of code (in Sitecore.XA.Feature.Composites.Pipelines.GetXmlBasedLayoutDefinition InjectCompositeComponents) was assigning placeholders to children.

I think this is the source of the problem and thus we can't do anything but ask for Sitecore's help.

Answer 2

Not being able to edit SXA's code, here is the ugly workaround I found.

Its main drawback is that it doesn't take benefit from the rendering variants. But at least it works.

In Carousel.cshtml, depending on the template used for the slide, I invoke the right html instead of creating a placeholder for a slide,

@if (composite.Value.TemplateID.Equals(StandardSlideID)))
    {
         @Html.Partial("../StandardSlide/StandardSlide", new StandardSlide { Item = composite.Value })
    }

@if (composite.Value.TemplateID.Equals(TestimonialSlideID))
    {
         @Html.Partial("../TestimonialSlide/TestimonialSlide", new TestimonialSlide { Item = composite.Value })
    }

I have to admit I'm a bit disapointed SXA isn't fully tested even with personalization which is one of my favourite Sitecore feature