Debugging AEM as a Cloud Service with Repository Browser

Let’s quickly check out the AM as a cloud service repository browser, which provides an easy way for developers to inspect the underlying data repository AM runs on and is a great tool to help debug AM. First, ensure that your user is a member of the cloud manager developer role. Then from cloud manager, identify the AM environment whose repository you want to browse. Open its developer console and from within here select the repository browser tab. Before we open the repository browser, it’s important to ensure the appropriate service tier is selected since you can discreetly browse author or publish or preview. It doesn’t matter which pod from the tier you pick, but for clarity I like to use the all selections. So I’ll select all authors to browse the author repository and then I can select open the repository browser. The repository browser itself is simple yet effective. It provides a read-only view of AM’s repository displaying the resource tree and properties. Keep in mind that the repository browser only displays resources your user is entitled to see, so if your user is part of the AM administrators you’ll see everything. If not, your view into the repository will be limited to the permissions available to your user. Note that if you’re going to open the publish or preview tier in the repository browser, review the documentation on how to ensure your permissions are properly set up. Okay, let’s check it out. Drill under the resource tree by selecting the chevron to the left of each resource and let’s drill down into a DAM asset. So we’ll head down into content DAM and continue on. Here’s our asset and let’s go a little further to the metadata resource. We can review the resources properties by selecting the resource itself and you can see our properties show up here on the right and we’ll see the property name as well as its value. Just a quick note, multivalued properties are displayed in brackets with comma separation. So the repository browser also provides a preview of certain file based resources. For example, selecting an asset rendition provides an in-context preview and we can of course download any of these files to our local machine. Repository browser has some additional smarts as well, so for instance selecting a DAM asset which has multiple file based resources beneath it, which are its renditions, provides a preview of all of the renditions along the top, allowing us to click through them for quick preview. You can see that not only images are supported but also some text-based files as well. Similarly, we can view code resources under slash apps or slash libs using the same approach. Simply locate and select the code file and open as preview. You can debug permissions as well by inspecting access control lists by opening the rep policy nodes and reviewing the allow and deny entries. Lastly, it’s worth noting that the repository browser shows all resources and by this I mean sling resources rather than JCR nodes. For this reason you may see resources listed here that are provided via resource providers and properties added via resource decorators, even though they may not exist as true JCR nodes or properties. So for example slash is and slash mnt or mount are not actual JCR nodes but rather provided by sling. So just be aware of this especially if you’re debugging code that uses the JCR APIs rather than sling’s resource APIs. Okay, hope this gives you a quick overview of the repository browser. Happy debugging!