Segmentation on first page hit

Bowker

I have a test case that shows that segmentation of the sitemap on the first page hit does not work.

Sitemap:
primary segment has two pages defined with aliases, aaa and bbb.
second segment has two pages defined with aliases, bbb and ccc

The second segment has the condition of "always true" which should mean that the second segment is always active for all users.

Visiting the site for the first time:
aaa - displays page aaa
bbb - displays page bbb
ccc - displays "invalid site" (Notice not the "error" page)

if you visit "/" first (which works) then visit:
aaa - displays "invalid site"
bbb - displays page bbb
ccc - displays page ccc

Another way to test was on the first hit go to aaa (and get aaa) then press refresh, you get "invalid site".

Is there anyone using Segmentation successfully and does it work on the first hit to the site?

Rick Poulin

Can confirm your findings.

Basically what happens is that, for any given request rendering, the alias gets resolved before the precontrollers execute. As you can imagine, this needs to happen in that order because it doesn't know what precontrollers to execute until it knows which page/site you're asking for. The first time you visit the site, the precontrollers haven't executed when it tries to resolve the alias, so the alias resolution piece doesn't check segment B because it can't know at this point whether or not segment B applies to that user. Chicken and egg situation.

The only solution I can see is to have a precontroller (obviously executes after segment eval) that checks if you're heading to an error page and then double-checks if the requested URL might've been a valid alias in the matched segments and HTTP 302's to it when that's the case. Feels pretty dirty though, and probably has a non-negligible performance impact unless you can determine whether or not it's a first-visit request.