Generating URL based on AEM RUN mode using AEM Externalizer Service

By
AEM allows us to create content for various channels. In large enterprise ecosystem AEM is central system to deliver content to mobile, web, email, big screens and devices like echo show. Same content can be rendered in different ways and formats and that is a big advantage of AEM.

In this article, we are going to look at one specific challenge that becomes very visible when AEM delivers content via email, mobile etc. The challenge is making sure that links embedded in emails and content delivered via email are not broken. There are various ways in which you can fix this problem:
  1. Dynamically determine the host URL based on incoming request (sling request and resolver) but, this is not possible in all situations (especially when original request is not originated from a resource/page served by same AEM instance)
  2. Create your own OSGi configuration to store AEM instance host domain. This needs to be different for Author and Publisher
  3. Hardcoded URLs … a big NO for this

Haven’t AEM team thought about this? Yes, they did and if we want to solve this problem in AEM way then we should AEM Externalizer Service.

Externalizer is an OSGI service programmatically transform a resource path (e.g. /content/mysite/mypage) into an external and absolute URL (for example, http://www.site.com/content/mysite/mypage) by prefixing the path with a pre-configured DNS. Author and Publish mapping is done for you but, we can map other custom URLs based on run mode/host DNS and while building URLs we can use appropriate configuration based on run mode of server to generate external URLs.

In this article, we are going to create a simple OSGi service that can be used to generate a link for external content delivery.

Step 1: Configure AEM with URLs for all run modes
  1. Navigate to system console by entering URL http://:/system/console/configMgr
  2. Open “Day CQ Link Externalizer” configuration, this will look like

  1. Define a domain mapping for custom domains (if needed)
  2. Save changes

Step 2: Create sample OSGi service (interface and implementation)
Create a simple interface for sample OSGi service that we will implement


Implement ExternalLinkBuilderService interface


Step 3: Inject service created in Step# 2 in other classes
Now we can inject this service into other OSGi components (using @Reference) and call method buildExternalLink() with internal path and it’ll return an absolute link based on run mode

Small but a very useful concept. I hope you have enjoyed reading this. Feel free to post your comments.

References:
Externalizer Documentation & API usage: https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/6-3/sites/developing/using/reference-materials/javadoc/com/day/cq/commons/Externalizer.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AEM, FORM Submission & Handling POST requests

By
In this article I’ll be specifically talking about how to handle POST request in AEM and what options we have. Please note that Adobe has added more security around handling POST request from AEM 6.x onwards to prevent CSRF attack. If you don’t configure AEM correctly, POST requests will not work even after using any of methods explained in this article.   You can read more about security configurations and restriction at: https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-1/develop/security/csrf-protection.html It is very common use cases to have external application POST some data to an AEM page (e.g. /content/en/home.html) or even submit a form (POST) to same URL. But, as you know that in AEM POST works differently and any POST call to AEM is intercepted by Sling’s POST servlet (org.apache.sling.servlets.post.impl.SlingPostServlet). In some cases org.apache.sling.servlets.post.impl. SlingPostServlet is very useful when you actually want to perform CURD (create, update, read a...
Read more

AEM - Query list of components and templates

By
Some time while migration or for auditing purposes we need to know where a particular component/template or any other resource have been used. Have you ever wondered about how to fetch a list of all the paths where a particular component or template is being used? I this short article I am going to show a quick way to write a utility with which you can get list if paths (actual resource nodes) where a targeted resource is being used. Here is the code snipped: public void getResourceListHelper(Resource parentResource , String targetSearchPropertyKey ,  String targetSearchPropertyValue , List components ) {      Resource childResource ; for (Iterator resourceChildrenIter = parentResource .listChildren(); resourceChildrenIter .hasNext();  getResourceListHelper ( childResource, targetSearchPropertyKey, targetSearchPropertyValue, components)) { childResource = (Resource) resourceChildrenIter .next(); ValueMap childProperties = (...
Read more

AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) – Architecture Overview

By
Image
AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) – Architecture Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is one of the leading CMS from Adobe and is part of Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC). The Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) web content management offers a set of capabilities for creating, managing, delivering, and personalizing content across various digital marketing channels, including web, mobile, and email.  Before we dive into architecture of AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) we need to understand why AEMaaCS is needed and how it is different as compared to classic AEM. To understand this, we’ll first look at: Evolution/history of AEM Challenges with traditional/classic AEM (the AEM that majority of us have used from last 10-12 years) Evolution/History of AEM The software was originally launched in early 2000 as Communiqué (CQ) by Day Software of Basel, Switzerland. After CQ 5.3 had been released, Day Software was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2010 then CQ became Adobe Experience Manager. ...
Read more

AEM 6.3 - Bundle Whitelisting - Deprecation of administrative authentication

By
Image
I stumbled on an issue when I was using neab with AEM 6.3. I created few neba ResourceModels and when I tried to access neba Model Registry, I got an error ( java.lang.IllegalStateException: org.apache.sling.api.resource.LoginException: Bundle org.eclipse.gemini.blueprint.extender is NOT whitelisted ): Image: neba Model Registry Menu Image: Error Screen NOTE: Neba team has already fixed it on their development branch and we don’t need to explicitly add whitelisting configuration for neba bundle. Here is the reason for error Originally the ResourceResolverFactory.getAdministrativeResourceResolver and SlingRepository.loginAdministrative methods have been defined to provide access to the resource tree and JCR Repository. These methods proved to be inappropriate because they allow for much too broad access. Consequently these methods are being deprecated and will be removed in future releases of the service implementations. The following methods are deprecat...
Read more