Troubleshooting List Generation in Marketing (Doc ID 564524.1)

Last updated on FEBRUARY 11, 2021

Applies to:

Purpose

Working with lists is the process of analyzing, building, and managing lists of customers or prospective customers. Lists are created for specific purposes and are based on predefined templates or other lists, segments, workbooks, or custom SQL. For example, for a product launch campaign, you would specifically target customers who have earlier purchased a related product from you. To do so, you can use seeded cross sell list templates to build an effective cross sell list of candidates based on past orders.

The list generation process is an asynchronous (deferred) process and depends on the Workflow Background to complete.
After a list has been defined and selections have been added, the list is in status Draft. When lists are in status Draft, the user is able to modify the selections and other settings of the list. This status is used when a new list is created and also when a list generation has failed due to some internal error.

When the list setup is complete, the user presses the Generate button. Immediately afterwards, the list status changes to Scheduled and this means that a request has been added to the Workflow Deferred queue and the list is now scheduled to be generated.
Next time the Workflow Background process runs on the system, this request will be picked up and processed. If everything works correctly, at the time when the generation request is processed, a new workflow will be created and the the list status will change to Generating.

If the list status does not change and remains Scheduled for a long amount of time, then most probably the cause is related to the Workflow Deferred queue or other Workflow setup. This means that something is preventing the workflow request to be picked up from the deferred queue. Some usual causes are: Workflow Deferred Agent not running (or being stuck), long Workflow Deferred queue (meaning a lot of requests are waiting on the queue), List generation events not defined or registered correctly.
Section List remains in status Scheduled contains more details on how to troubleshoot this situation.

After the status of the list changes to Generating, the list generation process has been kicked off and the generation algorithm is running.
Depending on the selection types and the amount of data used in creating the list, the generation process might take longer or can complete almost immediately.
If the process gets stuck in Generating phase, then a good point to start troubleshooting would be to look at the corresponding Workflow item. For each item there is a Workflow diagram available in the Status Monitor under Workflow Administrator.
The diagram shows the activity where the process gets stuck (or where an error occurred - if this is the case).

In case an error has occurred in the generation process, the list status changes back to Draft (in order to give the user the chance to correct any setup issues).
If the list status has changed from Generating to Draft, then the best way to start troubleshooting is by looking at the generation log.
To collect this log, please refer to section Collecting Marketing List Generation Logs.

The most common issues encountered in list generation process are :

1. List remains in status Scheduled
2. List status changes from Generating to Draft
3. List remains in status Generating

Troubleshooting Steps

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