A/B-Split Job Details

The A/B-Split Job Details screen lets you access the details of an A/B-Split Job so that you can view and edit the various job parts and variant jobs.

Summaries of the most important aspects of the A/B-Split Job and its variant jobs are shown, and you can click on the secions to edit any of the job parts or variants.

Depending on the A/B-Split Job's state, some of the sections described below may not be clickable or are shown in a disabled state to indicate that a previous section must be completed first.

A/B-Split Job

Edit the job title, job-ID prefix, job type, delivery notification, "authorization due by" date, and auto-archive settings. See here for more information about A/B-Split Jobs and their settings.

Recipients

Define the recipients of the A/B-Split Job. Note that you defined only one set of recipients and that this set is used for all A/B-split variant jobs. Depending on your choices for the A/B-Split Job (see above), the set is distributed across the variant jobs differently: For a Standard A/B-Split Job, the set is distributed evenly across all variant jobs. Contrary to this, an A/B-Split Job With Sampling aims at reserving the majority of the recipients set for the Main Job, whereas a smaller set is used for the Sampling Variant Jobs

Variant Job Definition, Scheduling and Delivery Authorization

• Standard A/B-Split Job: For a Standard A/B-Split Job, you define the Variant Jobs, the Delivery Settings and authorize their delivery as follows:

  • Variant Jobs: This section describes the variant jobs and their current definition state. For each variant job, you must define the mail job content, the tracking settings, the sender settings and you must perform a test delivery. Click the section to open a dialog with details about the variant jobs:

    Each variant job is displayed in a separate row, with job ID, job title, and a state icon showing whether this variant's definition is complete or not.

    In addition, a Delete link may appear next to each variant job, allowing you to delete the corresponding variant job (the link does not appear if only the minimum number of variant jobs is present in the A/B-Split Job).

    Click the Add Variant Job link at the bottom of the list to add another variant job to the A/B-Split Job.

  • Schedule Settings (Individual): If you choose so on the A/B-Split Job's settings, you can define individual delivery schedules for each of the variants. Click the section to open a dialog with a list of the variants. Next to each variant, a link is shown that gives you access to the this variant job's delivery settings screen, similar to how this is done for a (non-split) Standard Mail Job.

  • Schedule Settings (Combined): With individual delivery schedules disabled in the A/B-Split Job's settings, clicking this section directly opens a screen with delivery settings which are shared across all variants and are also defined in a manner that is similar to the delivery settings for a Standard Mail Job

  • Authorize Delivery: With the shared (or individual) delivery settings completed, this section is now active and gives you access to a screen that authorizes the delivery of all variant jobs in one action.

• A/B-Split Job With Sampling: For an A/B-Split Job With Sampling, you first define the Sampling Variant Jobs, their Delivery Settings and authorize their delivery. Then you do the same for the Main Variant Job.

  • Sampling Variant Jobs: Defining the sampling variant jobs, their delivery settings and authorizing their delivery is performed similar to above. The key difference is that delivery of the Main Variant Job is retained until after you have authorized the sampling delivery and that the delivery settings and delivery authorization only apply to the sampling variant jobs and not the main variant job.

  • Main Variant Job: The reason for creating and sending an A/B-Split Job With Sampling is that the tracking statistics collected for the sampling variants can be used to decide about the definition of the Main Variant Job. The first goal is to define the subject, the message body and the sender definition so that this content suits best for the majority of the recipients. Click this section to open a dialog that details how the Main Variant is defined.

    Choose "Use a tracking metric to define the main job automatically" if you want LISTSERV Maestro to base the decision about the main job's definition on a tracking metric of your choice. This allows you to schedule the sampling delivery and the main job delivery in advance as a combined automatic delivery sequence, requiring special additional delivery settings (see below). This choice is especially useful if the sampling and main job delivery shall fall into a time during longer out-of-office hours (such as a seasonal holiday period), but the job content must be defined in advance, without the tracking results from the sampling delivery already available.

    If you instead choose "Define main job manually", then this requires that all sampling variant jobs have already been delivered, thus providing tracking results at the moment when you define the main job. You can then start defining the main job by picking components from sampling variants and optionally refine the main job definition.

  • Delivery Settings (Main Job Defined Manually): With the main variant defined manually (see above), this section gives you access to the main job's delivery settings, which are defined in the same way as the delivery of a Standard Mail Job is configured. This is described in more detail here.

  • Delivery Settings (Main Job Defined Automatically): With the main variant defined automatically (see above), this section is typically shown at a time when the sampling delivery has not yet occurred. Click the section to open a screen with delivery settings, which are described in more detail here.

Triggered Delivery

If all or some of the variant jobs have their delivery settings set to Triggered Delivery, then this delivery can be triggered either from inside of Maestro (select Trigger Delivery of Authorized A/B-Split Job Variants... from the menu), or it can be triggered externally, with an external trigger.

The external delivery trigger is of the "Simple URL Access" type and does not contain any download data in its response. See below for more details about external triggers and what this means in detail.

For the external trigger, a special security token is required.

Important: Everyone who is in possession of this security token and who can also access Maestro on its HTTP port (for example with a normal web browser) will be able to trigger the delivery of the variant jobs. The security token should therefore be closely guarded and not be given out to unauthorized persons.
Because of this, the screen does not display the token directly (so no one can simply look over your shoulder and "steal" the token). To display the token, you first have to click on the Show Security Token for Delivery Trigger link (this security token is not required for a manual trigger via the menu).

Creating a new Security Token: If you suspect that an unauthorized person has gained access to the security token, you can use the Create New Security Token link to invalidate the previously used token and to create a new one.

For a Standard A/B-Split Job with common delivery settings for variants, the A/B-Split Job has a common security token that can be obtained on the A/B-Split Job's details page here, once the variants have been authorized. The variants do not have individual security tokens.
If the common security token is used to trigger the action, then this will trigger the delivery of all variants.

For a Sampling A/B-Split Job with common delivery settings for the sampling variants, the A/B-Split Job has a common security token that can be obtained on the A/B-Split Job's details page here, once the variants have been authorized. Neither the sampling variants nor the main variant have individual security tokens.
If the common security token is used to trigger the action, then this will trigger either the delivery of the sampling variants or the delivery of the main variant, depending on which variants are currently authorized for delivery. I.e., in this case the security token has to be used twice: At first the sampling variants are authorized, then the security token is used to trigger their delivery. Later the main variant is authorized, then the same security token is used to trigger its delivery too.

If the A/B-Split Job has individual delivery settings for the variants (either standard variants or sampling variants), then this page here does not contain a delivery security token because in such a case each variant also as an individual security token. These tokens can then be found on the individual job details pages of the variants (once the variants have been authorized).

External Triggers

LISTSERV Maestro offers several actions that can be triggered remotely from an external source by simply accessing a special external trigger URL, via the HTTP protocol. This trigger URL can be accessed without the need to first login to Maestro.

With this, several scenarios are possible:

• If there are actions that need to be triggered manually by a user who does not want to login to Maestro first; then, the user could create bookmarks in his browser, where each bookmark contains a trigger URL and stands for an action that can be triggered. Or, perhaps a custom-made HTML page could be created with links that point to the trigger URLs.

• In a different scenario, these actions could be triggered by another process, such as a script or program. To trigger an action, all this other process has to do is to open a HTTP communication to the action's trigger URL. This type of external process could, for example, trigger an action according to a certain time schedule or each time a certain outside event happens.

To secure the external trigger URLs against unauthorized access, a security token needs to be included in each URL. Each action that can be triggered externally has a unique security token. Therefore, the security token in the URL serves two purposes: It identifies the action that is to be triggered, and it validates that the user or process that makes this request is indeed authorized to do so.

The security token for the action in question can be obtained from inside of the Maestro user interface. The exact location where the token can be obtained depends on the action that it stands for. Please see the description of the action in question for this information.

Important: You should make sure that this security token is not given out to unauthorized persons because anyone who knows the security token of a certain action is able to trigger this action, as long as he also has HTTP access to the Maestro server. If you suspect that an unauthorized person has gained access to the token, then you can create a new token (and invalidate the existing token) by clicking the appropriate link at the location where you obtained the token.

A trigger URL always has the following form:

http://SERVER_NAME/lui/externalAction.do?token=SECURITY_TOKEN

• where SERVER_NAME is replaced with the name of your Maestro server. (If a non-standard HTTP port is used, also include the port, separated with a colon ":". If access to your Maestro is protected with HTTPS, you need to specify "https://" instead of "http://".)

• where SECURITY_TOKEN is replaced with the security token for the action that the URL shall trigger.

External triggers come in two variants:

• Simple URL Access: The action is triggered by accessing the external trigger URL with a HTTP GET request.

  By accessing this URL, a HTTP GET request is made to Maestro. The server then first verifies the given security token and, if it is valid, triggers the corresponding action. The result of the action is returned in the form of a HTTP response.

  If everything went well, a response with the status code "200 - OK" is returned. In this case, the response body contains the result of the action. Most actions return a simple "OK" text in the result, but some actions may also return more data in the result; for example, if the purpose of the action was to download certain data from Maestro.

  If there was a problem executing the action, a response with a different status code is returned, such as "404 - Not Found" if an invalid security token was specified.

• URL Access with Additional Data: The action is triggered by accessing the external trigger URL with a HTTP POST request.

  In contrast to the "simple URL access" of above, the trigger URL must be accessed with a HTTP POST request, and the additional data that is necessary for the action must be included as part of the request body. The data that is required depends on the action in question. Please see the description of the action for this information.

  The result of the action is returned in form of a HTTP response, just like for the "simple URL access". Please see above for details.