CQ/AEM staging concept with workflows

0
votes

We are facing a special requirement from our customer and my research didn't find this scenario on docs.adobe.com:

AEM is used as a CMS for other applications and has no client facing direct HTTP access on the publish systems. The authors create business critical content on the author system but can't do an end2end test, because they need a publish instance with anonymous access to the content without any edit functionality. I know they could create the content on a different system and than copy the content with content packages. But this is too cumbersome for day to day usage.

What I imagined is a two step activation:

  1. the author starts a workflow which replicates the content to a special internal publish server
  2. the approver does an en2end test with the application on this special publish server
  3. the approver completes the workflow and the content is replicated to the public publish server

Would this be a feasible scenario? If yes, how would I need to configure the replication agents for these two publish servers? If no, how could I achieve this, if even possible?

1
aem
why not just impersonate as anonymous? – awd
@awadheshv as I said it is part of a larger application, so it is not a user accessing CQ direclty but indirectly through another app. – Thomas

1 Answers

1
votes

A workflow can be developed with following steps

  1. Author Initiates workflow -> Replicates content to internal publish server. AEM provides ReplicationOptions API. This can help selecting the replication agent using public void setFilter(AgentFilter filter). Agent can be named as per requirement, regex can be used to match required agents as given in link reference. A workflow process can be created for this. The request would reside with approver (Using Participant Step). Approver can now verify the content on internal publish server.
  2. Once approver approves content, on Approval another workflow process push the content to public publish server, here also we can use public void setFilter(AgentFilter filter)
  3. If multiple pages/assets need to be published, Workflow Package feature can be used to bundle multiple pages/assets. This of-course needs adding the code in Workflow Processes created in step 1, 2 to publish pages/assets by iterating over payloads that are part of workflow package