Customizing and Extending Content Fragments

Within Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service a content fragment extends a standard asset; see:

• Creating and Managing Content Fragments and Page Authoring with Content Fragments for further information about content fragments.

• Managing Assets for further information about standard assets.

Architecture

The basic constituent parts of a content fragment are:

• A Content Fragment,
• consisting of one or more Content Elements,
• and which can have one or more Content Variations.

The individual Content Fragments are based on Content Fragment Models:

• Content fragment models define the structure of a content fragment when it is created.

• A fragment references the model; so changes to the model may/will impact any dependent fragments.

• Models are built-up of data types.

• Functions to add new variations, etc., have to update the fragment accordingly.

  NOTE

  For you to display/render a Content Fragment, your account must have read permissions for the model.

  CAUTION

  Any changes to an existing content fragment model can impact dependent fragments; this can lead to orphan properties in those fragments.

Integration of Sites with Assets

Content Fragment Management (CFM) is part of AEM Assets as:

• Content fragments are assets.
• They use existing Assets functionality.
• They are fully integrated with Assets (admin consoles, etc.).

Content Fragments are considered a Sites feature as:

• They are used when authoring your pages.

Mapping Content Fragments to Assets

Content fragments, based on a content fragment model, are mapped to a single asset:

• All content is stored under the jcr:content/data node of the asset:

  • The element data is stored under the master sub-node:
    jcr:content/data/master

  • Variations are stored under a sub-node that carries the name of the variation:
    for example, jcr:content/data/myvariation

  • The data of each element is stored in the respective sub-node as a property with the element name:
    for example, the content of element text is stored as property text on jcr:content/data/master

• Metadata and associated content is stored below jcr:content/metadata
  Except for the title and description, which are not considered traditional metadata and stored on jcr:content

Asset Location

As with standard assets, a content fragment is held under:

/content/dam

Asset Permissions

For further details see Content Fragment - Delete Considerations.

Feature Integration

To integrate with Assets core:

• The Content Fragment Management (CFM) feature builds on the Assets core.

• CFM provides its own implementations for items in the card/column/list views; these plug into the existing Assets content rendering implementations.

• Several Assets components have been extended to cater for content fragments.

Using Content Fragments in Pages

Content fragments can be referenced from AEM pages, just as any other asset type. AEM provides the Content Fragment core component - a component that allows you to include content fragments on your pages. You can also extend this Content Fragment core component.

• The component uses the fragmentPath property to reference the actual content fragment. The fragmentPath property is handled in the same manner as similar properties of other asset types; for example, when the content fragment is moved to another location.

• The component allows you to select the variation to be displayed.

• Additionally, a range of paragraphs can be selected to restrict the output; for example, this can be used for multi-column output.

• The component allows in-between content:

  • Here the component allows you to place other assets (images, etc.) in between the paragraphs of the referenced fragment.

  • For in-between content you need to:

    • be aware of the possibility of unstable references; in-between content (added when authoring a page) has no fixed relationship to the paragraph it is positioned next to, inserting a new paragraph (in the content fragment editor) before the position of the in-between content can lose the relative position

    • consider the additional parameters (such as variation and paragraph filters) to configure what is rendered on the page

Integration with other Frameworks

Content fragments can be integrated with:

• Translations

  Content Fragments are fully integrated with the AEM translation workflow. On an architectural level, this means:

  • The individual translations of a content fragment are actually separate fragments; for example:

    • they are located under different language roots; but share exactly the same relative path below the relevant language root:

      /content/dam/<path>/en/<to>/<fragment>

      vs.

      /content/dam/<path>/de/<to>/<fragment>

  • Besides the rule-based paths, there is no further connection between the different language versions of a content fragment; they are handled as two separate fragments, although the UI provides the means to navigate between the language variants.

  NOTE

  The AEM translation workflow works with /content:

  • As the content fragment models reside in /conf, these are not included in such translations. You can internationalize the UI strings.

• Metadata schemas

  • Content fragments (re)use the metadata schemas, that can be defined with standard assets.

  • CFM provides its own, specific schema:

    /libs/dam/content/schemaeditors/forms/contentfragment

    this can be extended if required.

  • The respective schema form is integrated with the fragment editor.

The Content Fragment Management API - Server-Side

You can use the server-side API to access your content fragments; see:

com.adobe.cq.dam.cfm

Key Interfaces

The following three interfaces can serve as entry points:

• Content Fragment (ContentFragment)

  This interface allows you to work with a content fragment in an abstract way.

  The interface provides you with the means to:

  • Manage basic data (for example, get name; get/set title/description)

  • Access meta data

  • Access elements:

    • List elements

    • Get elements by name

    • Create new elements (see Caveats)

    • Access element data (see ContentElement)

  • List variations defined for the fragment

  • Create new variations globally

  • Manage associated content:

    • List collections
    • Add collections
    • Remove collections

  • Access the fragment’s model

  Interfaces that represent the prime elements of a fragment are:

  • Content Element (ContentElement)

    • Get basic data (name, title, description)

    • Get/Set content

    • Access variations of an element:

      • List variations
      • Get variations by name
      • Create new variations (see Caveats)
      • Remove variations (see Caveats)
      • Access variation data (see ContentVariation)

    • Shortcut for resolving variations (applying some additional, implementation-specific fallback logic if the specified variation is not available for an element)

  • Content Variation (ContentVariation)

    • Get basic data (name, title, description)
    • Get/Set content
    • Simple synchronization, based on last modified information

  All three interfaces ( ContentFragment, ContentElement, ContentVariation) extend the Versionable interface, which adds versioning capabilities, required for content fragments:

  • Create new version of the element
  • List versions of the element
  • Get the content of a specific version of the versioned element

Adapting - Using adaptTo()

The following can be adapted:

• ContentFragment can be adapted to:

  • Resource - the underlying Sling resource; updating the underlying Resource directly requires rebuilding the ContentFragment object.

  • Asset - the DAM Asset abstraction that represents the content fragment; updating the Asset directly requires rebuilding the ContentFragment object.

• ContentElement can be adapted to:

  • ElementTemplate - for accessing the element’s structural information.

• FragmentTemplate

• Resource can be adapted to:

  • ContentFragment

Caveats

It should be noted that:

• The entire API is designed to not persist changes automatically (unless otherwise noted in the API JavaDoc). So you will always have to commit the resource resolver of the respective request (or the resolver you are actually using).

• Tasks that might require additional effort:

  • It is strongly recommended to create new variations from ContentFragment. This ensures that all elements will share this variation, and that appropriate global data structures will be updated as required to reflect the newly created variation in the content structure.

  • Removing existing variations through an element, using ContentElement.removeVariation(), will not update the global data structures assigned to the variation. To ensure these data structures are kept in sync, use ContentFragment.removeVariation() instead, which removes a variation globally.

The Content Fragment Management API - Client-Side

Additional Information

See the following:

• filter.xml

  The filter.xml for content fragment management is configured so that it does not overlap with the Assets core content package.

Edit Sessions

Editing a content fragment, which can span multiple views (= HTML pages), is atomic. As such atomic multi-view edit capabilities are not a typical AEM concept, content fragments use what is called an editing session.

An editing session is started when the user opens a content fragment in the editor. The editing session is finished when the user leaves the editor by selecting either Save or Cancel.

Technically, all edits are done on live content, just as with all other AEM editing. When the editing session is started, a version of the current, unedited status is created. If a user cancels an edit, that version is restored. If the user clicks on Save, nothing specific is done, as all the editing was executed on live content, therefore all changes are persisted already. Also, clicking on Save will trigger some background processing (such as creating full text search information and/or handling mixed-media assets).

There are some safety measures for edge cases; for example, if the user tries to leave the editor without saving or cancelling the editing session. Also, a periodic auto save is available to prevent data loss.
Note that two users may edit the same content fragment concurrently, and therefore may overwrite each other’s changes. To prevent this, the content fragment needs to be locked by applying the DAM administration’s Checkout action on the fragment.

Examples

Example: Accessing an existing content fragment

To achieve this you can adapt the resource that represents the API to:

com.adobe.cq.dam.cfm.ContentFragment

For example:

// first, get the resource
Resource fragmentResource = resourceResolver.getResource("/content/dam/fragments/my-fragment");
// then adapt it
if (fragmentResource != null) {
    ContentFragment fragment = fragmentResource.adaptTo(ContentFragment.class);
    // the resource is now accessible through the API
}

Example: Creating a new content fragment

To create a new content fragment programmatically, you need to use a
FragmentTemplate adapted from a model resource.

For example:

Resource modelRsc = resourceResolver.getResource("...");
FragmentTemplate tpl = modelRsc.adaptTo(FragmentTemplate.class);
ContentFragment newFragment = tpl.createFragment(parentRsc, "A fragment name", "A fragment description.");

Example: Specifying the auto-save interval

The auto save interval (measured in seconds) can be defined using the configuration manager (ConfMgr):

• Node: <conf-root>/settings/dam/cfm/jcr:content

• Property Name: autoSaveInterval

• Type: Long

• Default: 600 (10 minutes); this is defined on /libs/settings/dam/cfm/jcr:content

If you want to set an auto save interval of 5 minutes you need to define the property on your node; for example:

• Node: /conf/global/settings/dam/cfm/jcr:content

• Property Name: autoSaveInterval

• Type: Long

• Value: 300 (5 minutes equates to 300 seconds)

Components for Page Authoring

For further information see

• Core Components - Content Fragment Component (recommended)

Business.Adobe.com resources