AEM

Synchronizing the code between AEM Instance and Eclipse

In this post, we will learn how to sync the code between AEM Instance and Eclipse.

Versions Used : AEM -> 6.3 , Eclipse -> Oxygen 3a

We will use AEM Developer tools eclipse plugin to do the sync operation.

Install AEM Developer tools in Eclipse

1) Open eclipse -> Go to Help -> click on Eclipse Marketplace.

2) Search for AEM Developer tools and install the plugin.

Import AEM maven project into Eclipse

In Project explorer view -> right click and select Import option.

On Import popup window -> select maven -> existing maven projects.

Click Next -> browse maven project root directory.

Click finish. Now our AEM project is imported into eclipse.

Change the default perspective to AEM perspective

Go to Windows -> perspective -> open perspective -> select AEM -> click open

Now we have our project on AEM perspective.

Convert the maven modules into content and bundle projects

Right click on demo.core module -> configure -> click on convert to Bundle Project.

similarly right click on demo.ui.apps module -> select configure -> click on convert to Content Project.

Configure AEM server connector in Eclipse Servers view

To connect eclipse to AEM server click on “no servers are available” link in servers view.

Click finish. To edit the server connection details like port , debug port, username and password, double click on the configured server connector.

Edit the properties and save.

To add the bundle and ui.apps package to the configured server -> right click on the server connector -> select Add or Remove.

Add the bundles from left section to the right using Add button and click finish.

Start AEM Instance

Once the AEM Instance is started, go to eclipse and start the configured server in the Eclipse.

once server is started, the bundle and ui.apps modules will be published to the AEM server.

To verify go to OSGi bundles console and find the demo.core module.

If the bundle and ui.apps module is not published to the AEM server, republish the modules by removing all modules and adding them again to the Eclipse server connector.

Now the Demo project is deployed to AEM.

Importing the Code changes from AEM Instance to Eclipse

open CRXDE and edit a component html file.

Helloword.html file is updated with text “welcome to my world”as shown above.

To get the updated component to eclipse workspace, in eclipse right click on helloworld.html file and click on Import from server.

The file will be imported from the AEM Instance to eclipse.

Exporting the code changes from Eclipse to AEM

Updated helloword.html with some text in eclipse workspace as shown below.

The updated file will automatically synchronized/pushed to AEM Instance.

Thanks,

Madhu Samala

September 30, 2018 0

Customizing Granite UI Form Field Component

In this article, I will be showing how to customize a Granite UI Field component with an example.

Use case: Customize the Granite UI Textarea field component to display the number of characters the author has entered in the field.

Granite UI already provided a range of components designed to be used in Touch UI dialogs, and in AEM these form field components are available under /libs/granite/ui/components/foundation/form/*

Every Granite UI Form field component inherits /libs/granite/ui/components/foundation/form/field component.

The Granite UI base field component is composed of three files:

field.jsp: handles the generic processing, labelling, description and calls init.jsp and render.jsp

init.jsp: provides form value that we will need when rendering the field.

render.jsp: this is where the actual rendering of the field is performed and needs to be overridden for our custom field.

By default all the OOTB Granite UI form components uses the sling:resourceSuperType property to inherit from base field component and overrides the render.jsp.

To customize the Textarea component and show the number of characters the author has entered and recommended character count.

Step 1 : overlay or override the OOTB Textarea component into /apps/<project>/<any> folder.

Step 2 : modify the render.jsp file to show the recommended character count/no. of characters entered using coral UI character count api below the field.

Ref : https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-1/ref/coral-ui/docs/2.17.0-granite-004/character-count.html

Highlighted is the new code added to the overriden Textarea render.jsp file.

Step3: Assign the custom Textarea component to the dialog field nodes.

When the maxLength property is set on the field node its shows the assigned max length value else it shows zero.

I have assigned maxLength 20 on short description field and on long description field maxLength property is not set.

When the maximum Length has reached it displays error by highlighting the field with red border and the count goes to negative. If the MaxLength is not set then the count will be increased from zero to the number of characters entered.

Hope this will be useful.:)

Thank you!

Madhu Samala

August 12, 2018 0

AEM with Angular2

In this post, I will be sharing my view on Integrating AEM 6.1 with Angular2 and other front-end technologies with an example.

Getting started

Requirement

AEM component with Angular2.

Create an AEM with Angular2 Form Component which displays address suggestions to the user when the user starts typing in the address field and when the user selects one of the address suggestions, it should auto populate the country, state and zip code fields.
Leverage Angular2 Http Service to make Ajax calls to google maps API for the address suggestions and address details and display the response using Angular data-binding feature.
Leverage AEM Authoring capabilities to make the Form component labels authorable from the component dialog.

AEM Project Setup

Generate the project structure using maven archetype 10 and remove unwanted modules (ui.content, it.tests and it.launcher) for this project. Now we have two modules.

Core – contains Java files.
ui.apps – contains templates, components, Clientlibs and Angular2 code.

Maven archetype 10 gives the basic project setup with template, page components and Clientlibs. So I’m directly jumping on to creating the Form component.

Creating the Contact Details Form Component

Create an AEM component with the name “contactdetails” under apps/ng2-aem/components/content/.
Use bootstrap ui framework to build the Form component UI.
Create the Touch UI dialog to make the Form title, description, first name, last name, email and address field’s labels authorable.

Backend Code

ContactDetails POJO class

– /NG2-AEM.core/src/main/java/com/ng2/aem/core/models/ContactDetails.java

The ContactDetails class contains class members to match the fields specified in the component’s dialog, and also contains their getter and setter methods.

ContactDetailsUse class

– /NG2-AEM.core/src/main/java/com/ng2/aem/core/components/ContactDetailsUse.java

The ContactDetailsUse is the server-side part of the AEM component and it extends the WCMUsePojo class.

Contactdetails component HTL file

– apps/ng2-aem/components/content/contactdetails/contactdetails.html

Assuming that you are already familiar with creating component and dialog in AEM, i’m not showing the steps here to create it.

Component Dialog

Setting up the Angular2 code

Create a folder named “web” under /NG2-AEM.ui.apps/src/main/. This folder will contain our Angular2 code and its build configuration.

Build configuration

Create the following files under web folder.

package.json

Few words about scripts

build : invokes the “gulp build” task which then calls the “run-webpack” task to transpile Typescript code into JavaScript and bundle all the JS files into two files and place it into the AEM clientlib folder.

aemsync : invokes the “gulp aemsync” task to sync the generated JavaScript files under “etc/designs” to running AEM Instance.

watch : invokes the “gulp watch” task to watch the for the changes in typescript files, and when there is a change in typescript files it calls the “run-webpack” task.

NPM Packages

Angular 2 is broken into a lot of packages under @angular organization in NPM. We’ll need to install them and also need RxJS, Zone.js, and some shims which Angular2 depends on.

tsconfig.json

typings.json

Typings will be downloaded to typings folder and they will be downloaded on “npm install”.

Webpack.config.js

In Webpack config file we specify all the source files where they are available and how to compile and then after compilation where to put them.

Here I’m using webpack to transpile the Typescript code to JavaScript and bundle all the files into two JS files and place them into /etc/designs/ng2-aem/clientlib-site/js Clientlib folder.

app.js – contains the application code.
pollifills.js – contains the browser supporting libraries.

gulpfile.js

Gulp JS file contains following tasks.

clean : deletes the JS files from “/etc/designs/Ng2-AEM/clientlib-site/js” clientlib folder before webpack task runs.
run-webpack : executes the webpack config file.
aemsync : sync the JS files created with webpack to running AEM Instance.
watch : watches for the changes made on Typescript files and runs run-webpack task.

Angular2 Components

Angular2 is component based. Component is the combination of an HTML template and a component class that controls a portion of the screen.

Every component begins with a @Component decorator function that takes a metadata object. The metadata object describes how the HTML template and component class work together.

The selector property tells Angular to display the component’s html inside a custom () tag.

The templateUrl property specifies the URL to an external file containing the html for the view.

ContactDetails Angular2 component

– web/src/app/components/contactdetails.component.ts

AddressSuggestion Model class

– web/src/app/models/address-suggestion.ts

ContactForm Model class

– web/src/app/models/contact-form.ts

ContactDetailsService Interface

– web/src/app/services/Icontactdetails.service.ts

ContactDetailsService class

– web/src/app/services/contactdetails.service.ts

Application Module

– web/src/app/app.module.ts

Application bootstrap

– web/src/main.ts

Part2 : Click here to continue

February 20, 2018 3

AEM 6.2 User Migration

AEM Instance migration is common in real world , Package manager does help when you want to move users and groups privileges from one AEM instance to another.

User Migration Steps :

Go to package manager
Create a package for user migration and add below filters and rules.
- Add filter : /home/users
- Exclude Tokens : AEM implemented user token based authentication , all tokens will be stored under appropriate user node as rep:token node type.So we have to exclude tokens from package otherwise CRX will not allow to install package and throws javax.jcr.nodetype.ConstraintViolationException Exception.
- Exclude Admin & Anonymous users : CRX doesn’t allow to move or delete admin users,As these users has lockable node property hence cannot be copied on destination instance.
- Add rep:policy : All Users ,resource based permissions will be stored in rep:policy nodes ,So add root rep:policy user permission node to package.
1. Click save.
2. Build the package and download.
Unzip the package and open META-INF/vault/filter.xml in a text editor
Add mode=”merge” to the filter tag, for example:
[code language=”xml”]
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<workspaceFilter version="1.0">
<filter root="/home/users" mode="merge">
<exclude pattern="/home/users/a/admin"/>
<exclude pattern="/home/users/a/anonymous"/>
</filter>
</workspaceFilter>
[/code]
re-zip the package and install in new AEM instance .

December 31, 2016 1

Run Modes in AEM

Run modes in AEM allow you to configure AEM instances for specific purposes.
For example, We can configure environment specific OSGI Services meta data manually from felix console, But the problem here is whenever new build is deployed the OSGI meta data reset to default values , so again we have to configure. Instead of doing manually in felix console, we can create run mode config nodes in repository, sling will take these configuration automatically when we start the instance or config node update based on run mode values.

Topics :

Different types of run modes.
Standard run modes set up.
Custom run modes set up.
Create run mode nodes in the repository.
Order of precedence of run modes.
Read Sling run modes in Java

Run Mode types in AEM:

There are two types of run modes.

Standard run modes – author,publish,samplecontent,nosamplecontent
Custom run modes – dev,qa,stage,prod ..etc.

Standard run modes set up:

We can configure standard run modes directly by renaming jar file ,Standard run modes are used at installation time and then fixed for the entire lifetime of the instance, they cannot be changed.

The naming convention to for AEM 5.6.1 and later is:

aem-<optional-version-or-indentifier>-<standard-run-mode>-<port-number>

1. author – Run mode for author instance.
2. publish – Run mode for publish instance.
3. samplecontent – Run mode will install sample content.
4. nosamplecontent – Run mode will not install sample content.

Custom run modes set up:

We can define custom run modes different ways ,below are ways .

Using the sling.properties file :

The sling.properties file can be used to define the required run mode:

Edit the configuration file:
<cq-installation-dir>/crx-quickstart/conf/sling.properties
Add the following properties; the following example is for author:
sling.run.modes=author

Using the -R option :

A custom run mode can be activated by using the -r option when launching the quickstart. For example, use the following command to launch a AEM instance with run mode set to dev.

java -jar cq-56-p4545.jar -r dev

Using a system property in the start script:

A system property in the start script can be used to specify the run mode.
For example use the following to launch an instance as a production publish instance located in the US:
-Dsling.run.modes=publish,prod,us

Order of precedence of run modes:

Here my question is what happens if we did all above custom run mode configuration at a time,which one will take precedence .

below are the order of precedence of run modes.

Start jar (by double clicking) – In this you do not have option to set run mode in sling.properties, start script first time. JAR name takes precedence.
Unpack jar and specify run mode as system properties in start script – JAR name doesn’t comes to picture here. In this you do not have option to set run mode in sling.properties. System properties takes precedence.
Even if we change run mode in JAR name, it doesn’t changes the installation time run mode. For custom run mode, JAR file name is not applicable. Order of precedence is sling.properties -> specifying -r option (command line jar option) -> system properties (start script).

Read Sling run modes in Java:

We can read sling run modes directly from SlingSettingsService OSGI service.

[code language=”java”] import org.apache.sling.settings.SlingSettingsService;[/code]

[code language=”java”]@Reference
private SlingSettingsService slingSettingsService;[/code]

[code language=”java”]slingSettingsService.getRunModes(); [/code]

November 12, 2016 0

AEM HUB

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