Sitecore tip 25: be careful when changing profile or pattern names

Profiles and patterns are powerful ways of segmenting your visitors and use for personalization or interaction analysis. The actual configuration of your setup is pretty easy. But once you have them configured and use them in personalization rules or A/B tests be careful of changing their names!

There can be a scenario where you decide that a certain profile is no longer necessary. In stead of removing it you decide to rename it. Suddenly you personalization or A/B tests no longer work, at least for this profile.

This has to do with the fact that the rules will use the profile or pattern title/name to make the relation in stead of the GUID. I did not check the database on this, but the behavior I saw when preparing some demo’s was that I had to manually update the rule and select the renamed profile and pattern in order to let the rule work again.

Imagine a scenario where you have lots of important landingpages with lots of rules. Disaster if your setup no longer works. It can possible break your visitors experience.

So, don’t say I did not warn you ;-)! Better safe then sorry.