Experiments

Experiments are the ONGR Settings Bundles functionality that enables the user to experiment with the content that is displayed to a particular set of users, depending on the device that they are using. This is particularly useful for A/B testing, but is also desirable when there is a need to display different content on different devices.

Usage

Starting using it is very simple: just go to the Experiments tab of the settings panel provided by the bundle and create a new experiment. You will see that the set of profiles and environment conditions need to be provided. The conditions of the experiment that can be set include device type (desktop, mobile, etc.), device brand, client type (browser, library, media player, etc.), a specific client ('IE', 'Firefox', etc.) and the OS of the user.

Note, that if a certain condition is not set, it is interpreted as any

Now that you have a set of defined experiments, just enable them in the panel and the specified profiles of the experiments will be enabled automatically, provided the conditions of the experiment are met.

How it works?

The experiments are saved to Elasticsearch as a special kind of settings. There is an ExperimentListener class that is listening to kernel.request events and it checks whether there are any active experiments and if there are, it checks the conditions for all of them, determines which profiles need to be enabled and saves them in a separate cookie. This value is then being caught by the RequestListener class, merged with the value from the profiles cookie and set to the SettingsManager. Once the experiments cookie is set this process is not being repeated, because the ExperimentListener checks that and the rest of the parsing is skipped.