Replication 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 Developer that is outside of the AEM runtime.

NOTE
Read Distribution for more information.

Methods of Publishing Content methods-of-publishing-content

NOTE
If you are interested in bulk publishing content, create a workflow using the Tree Activation Workflow Step, which can efficiently handle large payloads.
It is not recommended to build your own bulk publishing custom code.
If you must customize for whatever reason, you can trigger a workflow with this step by using existing Workflow APIs.
It is always a good practice to only publish content that must be published. And be prudent about not trying to publish large numbers of content, if not necessary. However, there are no limits as to how much content you can send through workflows with the Tree Activation Workflow Step.

Quick Un/Publish - Planned Un/Publish publish-unpublish

This feature lets you publish the selected pages immediately, without the additional options possible through the Manage Publication approach.

For more information, see Manage Publication.

On and Off Times - Trigger Configuration 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 feature, enable Auto Replicate in the OSGi configuration On Off Trigger Configuration:

OSGi On Off Trigger Configuration

Manage Publication manage-publication

Manage Publication offers more options than Quick Publish, allowing for the inclusion of child pages, customization of the references, and starting any applicable workflows and offering the option to publish later.

Including a folder’s children for the “publish later” option invokes the Publish Content Tree workflow, described in this article.

You can find more detailed information on Manage Publication on the Publishing Fundamentals documentation.

Tree Activation Workflow Step tree-activation

The Tree Activaton workflow step is intended to performantly replicate a deep hierarchy of content nodes. It automatically pauses when the queue grows too large in order to allow other replications to proceed in parallel with minimal latency.

Create a Workflow Model that uses the TreeActivation 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 created model from the list, and press Edit

  5. In the following window, delete the Step that appears by default

  6. Drag and drop the Process Step to the current model flow:

    Process Step

  7. Select the Process step in the flow and select Configure by pressing the wrench icon.

  8. Select the Process tab and select Publish Content Tree from the drop-down list, then check the Handler Advance check box

    Treeactivation

  9. Set any additional parameters in the Arguments field. Multiple comma-separated arguments can be strung together. For example:

    enableVersion=false,agentId=publish,chunkSize=50,maxTreeSize=500000,dryRun=false,filters=onlyModified,maxQueueSize=10

    note note
    NOTE
    For the list of parameters, see the Parameters section below.
  10. Press Done to save the Workflow model.

Parameters

Name
default
description
path
root path to start from
agentId
publish
Replication agent name to use
chunkSize
50
Number of paths to bundle into a single replication
maxTreeSize
500000
Maximum number of nodes for a tree to be considered small
maxQueueSize
10
Maximum number of items in replication queue
enableVersion
false
Enable versioning
dryRun
false
When set to true replication is not acutally called
userId
only for job. On workflow the user calling the workflow is used
filters
List of node filter names. See supported filter below

Support Filters

Name
description
onlyModified
Nodes that were modified since last publish
onlyPublished
Nodes that were published before

Resume Support

The workflow processes content in chunks, each of which represents a subset of the full content to be published. If the workflow is stopped by the system, it will continue where it left off.

Monitoring Workflow Progress

  1. From the AEM as a Cloud Service homepage, go to Tools - General - Jobs.

  2. Look at the row corresponding to your workflow. The progress column gives an indication of how the replication is progressing. For example, it may display 41/564 and upon refreshing, it may be updated to 52/564.

    Treeactivation progress

  3. Selecting the row and opening it will provide additional details about the status of the workflow execution.

    Treeactivation status details

Publish Content Tree Workflow publish-content-tree-workflow

NOTE
This feature is deprecated in favor of the more performant Tree Activation step, which can be included in a custom workflow.
Click here to learn more about this deprecated feature.

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:

The Publish Content Tree Workflow Card

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

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

Alternatively, you can create 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 created model from the list, and press Edit

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

    Process Step

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

  7. Select the Process tab and select Publish Content Tree from the drop-down list, then check the Handler Advance check box

    Treeactivation

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

    enableVersion=true,agentId=publish,includeChildren=true

    note note
    NOTE
    For the list of parameters, see the Parameters section below.
  9. Press Done to save the Workflow model.

Parameters

  • includeChildren (boolean value, default: false). The value false means that only the path is published; true means that children are published too.

  • 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: false). This parameter determines if a new version is created upon replication.

  • agentId (string value, default means only agents for publish are used). It is recommended to be explicit about the agentId; for example, setting it the value: publish. Setting the agent to preview publishes to the preview service.

  • filters (string value, default means that all paths are activated). Available values are:

    • onlyActivated - only activate pages that have (already) been activated. Acts as a form of reactivation.
    • 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 logs its configuration parameters on the INFO loglevel. When paths are activated, an INFO statement is also logged.

A final INFO statement is logged after the workflow step has replicated all paths.

Also, 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.

If there are errors, the workflow step terminates with a WorkflowException, which wraps the underlying Exception.

The following are examples of logs that are generated during a sample publish content tree workflow:

code language-none
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
code language-none
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

Replication API replication-api

You can publish content using the Replication API featured in AEM as a Cloud Service.

For more information, see the API Documentation.

Basic Usage of the API

@Reference
Replicator replicator;
@Reference
ReplicationStatusProvider replicationStatusProvider;

....
Session session = ...
// Activate a single page to all agents, which are active by default
replicator.replicate(session,ReplicationActionType.ACTIVATE,"/content/we-retail/en");
// Activate multiple pages (but try to limit it to approx 100 at max)
replicator.replicate(session,ReplicationActionType.ACTIVATE, new String[]{"/content/we-retail/en","/content/we-retail/de"});

// ways to get the replication status
Resource enResource = resourceResolver.getResource("/content/we-retail/en");
Resource deResource = resourceResolver.getResource("/content/we-retail/de");
ReplicationStatus enStatus = enResource.adaptTo(ReplicationStatus.class);
// if you need to get the status for more more than 1 resource at once, this approach is more performant
Map<String,ReplicationStatus> allStatus = replicationStatusProvider.getBatchReplicationStatus(enResource,deResource);

Replication with Specific Agents

When replicating resources, as in the example above, only the agents that are active by default are used. In AEM as a Cloud Service, it means only the agent called “publish”, which connects the author to the publish tier.

To support the preview functionality, a new agent called “preview” has been added, which is not active by default. This agent is used to connect the author to the preview tier. If you want to replicate only by way of the preview agent, you must explicitly select this preview agent by way of an AgentFilter.

See the following example:

private static final String PREVIEW_AGENT = "preview";

ReplicationStatus beforeStatus = enResource.adaptTo(ReplicationStatus.class); // beforeStatus.isActivated == false

ReplicationOptions options = new ReplicationOptions();
options.setFilter(new AgentFilter() {
  @Override
  public boolean isIncluded (Agent agent) {
    return agent.getId().equals(PREVIEW_AGENT);
  }
});
// will replicate only to preview
replicator.replicate(session,ReplicationActionType.ACTIVATE,"/content/we-retail/en", options);

ReplicationStatus afterStatus = enResource.adaptTo(ReplicationStatus.class); // afterStatus.isActivated == false
ReplicationStatus previewStatus = afterStatus.getStatusForAgent(PREVIEW_AGENT); // previewStatus.isActivated == true

In case you do not provide such a filter and only use the “publish” agent, the “preview” agent is not used and the replication action does not affect the preview tier.

The overall ReplicationStatus of a resource is only modified if the replication action includes at least one agent which is active by default. In the example above, this flow was not the case. The replication was just using the “preview” agent. Therefore, you must use the new getStatusForAgent() method, which allows querying the status for a specific agent. This method also works for the “publish” agent. It returns a non-null value if there has been any replication action done using the provided agent.

Methods of Invalidating Content invalidating-content

You can directly invalidate content by using either Sling Content Invalidation (SCD) from author (the preferred method) or by using the Replication API to invoke the publish Dispatcher flush replication agent. See Caching page for further details.

Replication API capacity limits

Replicate fewer than 100 paths at a time, with 500 being the limit. Above the limit, a ReplicationException is thrown.
If your application logic does not require atomic replication, this limit can be overcome by setting the ReplicationOptions.setUseAtomicCalls to false, which accepts any number of paths, but internally create buckets to stay below this limit.

The size of the content transmitted per replication call must not exceed 10 MB. This rule includes the nodes and properties, but not any binaries (workflow packages and content packages are considered binaries).

Troubleshooting 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 publish

    Status

  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

Logs

If the content couldn’t be published, the whole publication is reverted from the AEM Publish Service.

In that case, the main, editable queue shows a red status and should be reviewed to identify which items caused the cancelation of the publication. By clicking that queue, its pending items show up, from which a single item or all items can be cleared if needed.

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