Deprecating Non-experiment Group Names

What

Removing non-experiment groups from the groupName API across all SDKs

When

April 3, 2024 (now live)

Why

When we first implemented group name accessors on DynamicConfigs, we did so as metadata about the evaluation, and included many non-experiment groups that get returned from the getGroupName API. We got feedback from a number of customers that the group name was only useful as an experiment group, so we forked the logic on our serverside to support that use case without making a breaking change.

This has lead to confusion amongst customers, and is fragile for anyone depending on the API. As such, we’ve decided to only return experiment group names from the getGroupName API for everyone.

If you were relying on group names for targeting gates, allocation, etc. you can use the rule_id on experiments instead (layerAssignment, targetingGate, override, abandoned, prestart, allocationDuration, and default) ruleIDs are all accessible to explain that group assignment

How

This is a server change on our side, it will not be versioned to a particular sdk version. Callsites that were getting non experiment group names will now just receive null/nil/language specific "null" values. getGroupName api should already be nullable, so all callsites across sdk languages should be able to handle a null group name already. Unfortunately, the getGroupName API does not trigger an exposure event, so we are unable to programmatically determine who is relying on this api.

Get Help

Please reach out to us in slack with any further questions, we’d be happy to assist.