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Manage flags and rules

Information on how to manage flags and rules in Optimizely Feature Experimentation.

The Flags dashboard gives you a view of what is happening to a flag and what rules are implemented for the flag.

Flags

Turn a flag on or off

Toggling a flag on or off enables or disables all rules for the environment:

Toggle a flag on or off

Toggle a flag on or off

Archive flag

You can archive a flag to remove it from the list of flags. Archiving a flag also removes it from the datafile. See Manage flags section for more information.

Optimizely Feature Experimentation keeps your flag and rule data, so you can unarchive the flag later.

To archive a flag,

  1. Navigate to Flags.
  2. Click Actions for the flag.
  3. Click Archive from the drop-down list.
Archive a flag

Unarchive flag

To unarchive a flag:

  1. Navigate to Flags.
  2. Click the filter menu and choose Yes from the Archived drop-down list.
  3. Click Actions for the experiment.
  4. Click Unarchive from the drop-down list.
Unarchive flag

Rules

A rule contains the experiment and targeting logic within a flag. Rules describe what variation the flag should deliver to a given user. A ruleset is the collection of rules associated with a flag.

📘

Note

You are limited to 100 rules per environment.

Reorder, Copy, or Delete rules

In the rules list, click Actions to reorder rules, create a copy of the rule in the current environment, or delete the rule. Drag and drop a rule to rearrange them.

Move rules

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Note

To duplicate experiment rules, you must not be on a free rollouts account.

Duplicate rule across environment

To duplicate a rule across an environment, select Add Rule, click Copy rules from, and select which environment you want to copy the rules from.

copy rule from another environment

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Note

Collaborators outside of your organization cannot create multiple experiments per flag. See collaborators documentation for more information.

Pause a rule

If you want to enable or disable individual rules within an environment, you can play or pause them:

Pause or play a rule

Pause or play a rule

Manage flag rules

You can add, remove, or update your flag's rules anytime. But, it is advised to turn your flag off before making changes.

❗️

Warning

You should not change your experiment while it is running. For more information, see Why you should not change a running experiment.

The following are configurable for rules:

  • Name
  • Description
  • Audiences
  • Traffic ramp percentage
  • Metrics
  • Traffic distribution mode
  • Variations
  • Exclusion groups

After you create a rule, you cannot change its key.

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Important

Be careful when you are changing experiment parameters

DO NOT change to your rule unless you are making the corresponding changes in your code. If you use a key that is not referenced in your code, no traffic will be sent to that experiment or variation.

To edit a flag rule:

  1. Click the rule name to open it.
  2. Change your rule parameters as desired.
  3. Click Save.
edit a flag rule

Changing your rules will update your project's datafile within a few seconds. It may take some time before your experiments are updated in production, depending on how often you retrieve datafile updates.

If you want your rules to update in real time, use webhooks to receive datafile updates.

Warning

Changing traffic allocation or group assignment for a running experiment will impact user bucketing, causing users to be bucketed in or unbucketed from this experiment. For more information, refer to How bucketing works.