Replication

Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service uses the Sling Content Distribution capability to move the content to replicate to a pipeline service run on Adobe I/O that is outside of the AEM runtime.

Methods of Publishing Content

Quick Un/Publish - Planned Un/Publish

These standard AEM functionalities for the authors do not change with AEM Cloud Service.

On and Off Times - Trigger Configuration

The additional possibilities of On Time and Off Time are available from the Basic tab of Page Properties.

To realize the automatic replication for this you need to enable Auto Replicate in the OSGi configuration On Off Trigger Configuration:

Tree Activation

To perform a tree activation:

1. From the AEM Start Menu navigate to Tools > Deployment > Distribution
2. Select the card forwardPublisher
3. Once in the forwardPublisher Web console UI, select Distribute
   
4. Select the path in the path browser, choose to add a node, tree or delete as required and select Submit

Publish Content Tree Workflow

You can trigger a tree replication by choosing Tools - Workflow - Models and copying the Publish Content Tree out-of-the-box workflow model, as shown below:

Do not modify or invoke the original model. Instead, make sure to first copy the model and then modify or invoke that copy.

Like all workflows, it can also be invoked via API. For more information, see Interacting with Workflows Programatically.

Alternatively, you can also achieve this by creating a Workflow Model that uses the Publish Content Tree process step:

1. From the AEM as a Cloud Service homepage, go to Tools - Workflow - Models

2. In the Workflow Models page, press Create in the upper right corner of the screen

3. Add a title and a name to your model. For more information, see Creating Workflow Models

4. Select the newly created model from the list, and press Edit

5. In the following window, drag and drop the Process Step to the current model flow:

   

6. Click the Process step in the flow and select Configure by pressing the wrench icon

7. Click on the Process tab and select Publish Content Tree from the drop down list

   

8. Set any additional parameters in the Arguments field. Multiple comma separated arguments can be stringed together. For example:

   enableVersion=true,agentId=publish

   NOTE

   For the list of parameters, see the Parameters section below.

9. Press Done to save the Workflow model.

Parameters

• replicateAsParticipant (boolean value, default: false). If configured as true, the replication is using the userid of the principal which performed the participant step.
• enableVersion (boolean value, default: true). This parameter determines if a new version is created upon replication.
• agentId (string value, default means all enabled agents are used).
• filters (string value, default means all paths are activated). Available values are:
  • onlyActivated - only paths which are not marked as activated will be activated.
  • onlyModified - activate only paths which are already activated and have a modification date later than the activation date.
  • The above can be ORed with a pipe “|”. For example, onlyActivated|onlyModified.

Logging

When the tree activation workflow step starts, it will log its configuration parameters on the INFO loglevel. When paths are activated, an INFO statement is also logged.

A final INFO statement will then be logged after the workflow step has replicated all paths.

Additionally you can increase the loglevel of the loggers below com.day.cq.wcm.workflow.process.impl to DEBUG/TRACE to get even more log information.

In case of errors, the workflow step terminates with a WorkflowException, which wraps the underlying Exception.

Below you will find examples of logs that are generated during a sample publish content tree workflow:

21.04.2021 19:14:55.566 [cm-p123-e456-aem-author-797aaaf-wkkqt] *INFO* [JobHandler: /var/workflow/instances/server60/2021-04-20/brian-tree-replication-test-2_1:/content/wknd/us/en/adventures] com.day.cq.wcm.workflow.process.impl.treeactivation.TreeActivationWorkflowProcess TreeActivation options: replicateAsParticipant=false(userid=workflow-process-service), agentId=publish, chunkSize=100, filter=, enableVersion=false

21.04.2021 19:14:58.541 [cm-p123-e456-aem-author-797aaaf-wkkqt] *INFO* [JobHandler: /var/workflow/instances/server60/2021-04-20/brian-tree-replication-test-2_1:/content/wknd/us/en/adventures] com.day.cq.wcm.workflow.process.impl.ChunkedReplicator closing chunkedReplication-VolatileWorkItem_node1_var_workflow_instances_server60_2021-04-20_brian-tree-replication-test-2_1, 17 paths replicated in 2971 ms

Resume Support

The workflow processes content in chunks, each of which represents a subset of the full content to be published. If for any reason the workflow is stopped by the system, it will restart and process the chunk that was not yet processed. A log statement will state that content has been resumed from a specific path.

Troubleshooting

To troubleshoot replication, navigate to the Replication Queues in the AEM Author Service Web UI:

1. From the AEM Start Menu navigate to Tools > Deployment > Distribution
2. Select the card forwardPublisher
   
3. Check the queue status which should be green
4. You can test the connection to the replication service
5. Select the Logs tab which shows the history of content publications

If the content couldn’t be published, the whole publication is reverted from the AEM Publish Service.
In that case, the queues should be reviewed in order to identify which items caused the cancelation of the publication. By clicking on a queue showing a red status, the queue with pending items would show up, from which single or all items can be cleared if needed.