Cloning programs across workspaces - be aware of a "fixed" capability that no longer works

[Dan_Stevens_]

Today, we came across a feature that had been working for us without issue - but is once again an issue.  This relates to an idea I had submitted back in 2014: .  After the December 2014 release, Marketo marked this as 'DONE'.  Which was great - everything worked/tested as desired.  Today, we tried to clone a program and the issue is back 😞

If any of your triggers/filters within the smart lists of the smart campaign are blank (or as you will see below, contain a 'dummy' value when used with the CONTAINS constraint), you will get errors when cloning.  In our case, we have a library of pre-built/complex programs (by channel, by activity) that enables us to quickly build out (customize/localize) a program for a specific marketing activity in a country workspace.  But if any of the triggers/filters in your smart lists of the smart campaigns is blank, you will now get errors.  For example:

Marketo Support is suggesting to delete all of these triggers/filters before cloning; and then add them back in to the cloned program (and the program template). This is not a solution. We can't just delete filters/triggers from our master templates, clone the program, and add them back in (to both programs) after the clone is complete.  This defeats the purpose of having program templates. I'm not sure what changed this all of a sudden - but it's impacting our ability to scale effectively across our global Marketo instance.

[Anonymous]

Oh man this sounds like a nightmare...thanks for posting. It would be fantastic if Marketo could build out the functionality of workspaces and partitions a bit more. Turning into a necessary evil.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan Stevens,

I suggest that you replace the IS by CONTAINS and set the value as "[replace me]". It may work.

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Greg - thanks for the suggestions (and I'm sure your approach will allow the program to be cloned), but the constraint needs to be "is", not "contains" (which is also for less efficient for defining specific behavior in Marketo).  "Contains" would significantly slow down the processing of our smart campaigns given the size of our environment.  The fact is this used to work for us - ever since they fixed this after the December 2014 release over a year ago - and now it doesn't again.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

HI Dan,

I understand this. The proposition to set it as "contains" is so that it is a valid statement for Marketo so that it does not raise any error and can be cloned. Of course, you will have to revert it to "IS" after cloning.

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Even that approach doesn't work.  I changed the smart list in the smart campaign to this:

And apparently Marketo considers this an invalid value as well.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Too bad At least we tried

May be you should remove the ";"

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Nope - that didn't work either.  Apparently is must contain a valid string that's been indexed before. 

[Dan_Stevens_]

Justin Cooperman​, has your team been able to look into this?  Support still has no answer for us.

[Justin_Cooperm2]

I asked a few people if they were aware of any changes in that area. I'll keep looking.