Our authors started reporting that they couldn’t apply personalization to pages, seeing an error in Experience Editor: 

“TestDefinitionItem.Start: Test item is not in workflow”

 

 Of course, the “please help!” was immediate, and my first action was to check the logs when I reproduce the issue. You’re always off to a good start when you can reproduce an issue, so seeing this is progress: 

ERROR One or more exceptions occurred while processing the subscribers to the 'item:saved' event.
  
Exception[1]: System.InvalidOperationException
Message[1]: Test item is not in workflow
Source[1]: Sitecore.ContentTesting.Model
at Sitecore.ContentTesting.Model.Data.Items.TestDefinitionItem.Start()
at Sitecore.ContentTesting.Managers.DeployAssociatedTestsManager.DeployTest(TestDefinitionItem testDefinitionItem)
at Sitecore.ContentTesting.Data.SitecoreTestDeploymentManager.DeployTestDefinition(TestDefinitionItem testDefinitionItem)
at Sitecore.ContentTesting.Events.PersonalizationTrackingHandler.ProcessPersonalizationTracking(Item item, ItemChanges itemChanges, ID deviceId)
at Sitecore.Events.Event.EventSubscribers.RaiseEvent(String eventName, Object[] parameters, EventResult result)
 
ERROR Failed to save the item. Item ID: {7205D926-C065-47A4-9829-CC39130B5472}, database: master
Exception: System.AggregateException
Message: One or more exceptions occurred while processing the subscribers to the 'item:saved' event.
Source: Sitecore.Kernel
at Sitecore.Events.Event.EventSubscribers.RaiseEvent(String eventName, Object[] parameters, EventResult result)
at Sitecore.Events.Event.RaiseEvent(String eventName, Object[] parameters)
at Sitecore.Events.Event.RaiseItemSaved(Object sender, ItemSavedEventArgs args)
at System.EventHandler`1.Invoke(Object sender, TEventArgs e)
at Sitecore.Data.Engines.EngineCommand`2.RaiseEvent[TArgs](EventHandler`1 handlers, Func`2 argsCreator)
at Sitecore.Data.Engines.EngineCommand`2.Execute()
at Sitecore.Data.Engines.DataEngine.SaveItem(Item item)

 

Trying One of the Many Common Fixes

Before diving deeper into what the resolution was, here’s what was tried but didn’t produce a resolution:

• Ensure everything in marketing control panel is published.
• Ensured xDB.Enabled, xDB.Tracking.Enabled, and ContentTesting.Enabled are enabled.
• Ensure all workflows are present and published from a different working instance.
• Removed a 2nd publishing target and tried again to be sure.
• Republished the entire site to be sure.

Alas, these did not help.

 

A Simple Fix – Disable Testing

The above error can be easily corrected by disabling automatic content testing, but do you want that? Well, if you do you can just disable it by changing the following value which is found in the default configuration file, Sitecore.ContentTesting.config:

<setting name="ContentTesting.AutomaticContentTesting.Enabled" value="true" />  

But hey, don’t do this. Please patch settings changed and do not directly change any default Sitecore file, unless you’re doing a temporary test and you’ll restore your changes later.

 

Validating Content Testing Settings

A better approach to resolving this issue is to check the __workflow field in the standard values for template /sitecore/templates/System/Content Testing/Test Definition. The path will be /sitecore/templates/System/Content Testing/Test Definition/__Standard Values or you can search for {E8FF85BF-4EC1-4F8D-9DE7-7B3841C3D593} instead.

In my instance I have “Analytics Testing Workflow”, with the ID {2BAE793F-7392-4790-9E67-9C60B6BF7D7B}. You want to ensure this is an existing and more importantly published workflow.

At this point everything looked good, yet the issue persisted.

A New Trick to an Old Problem

There are many suggestions online about ensuring workflows and marketing control panel are published, etc., after exhausting every effort but this just wasn’t helping.

The final solution I found was to check the items in the Test Lab at /sitecore/system/Marketing Control Panel/Test Lab. This whole issue was caused by some tests being stuck in draft or running states.

You can dive deeper into fixing these one by one, but I decided to purge them from Master and publish the tree, which was an immediate fix.

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