Sling Context-Aware configuration (part 6): replicate CA-Config

In the last blog posts we solely focused on the authoring case, where an author edits content and config. But I haven’t discussed yet how this CA-Config gets to the publish. As such config can be changed on the fly by authors, we cannot rely on deployment processes, but it has to fit into regular processes triggered and monitored by regular users.

And to make this happen, we will use an out-of-the-box functionality of AEM, replication. Replication is limited from an UI perspective to assets and pages, and we don’t want to change that for config.
That means, that we have to wrap all config into a cq:Page to make that work. Unfortunately Sling does not know anything about AEM pages and their structure (the page node and the jcr:content node), thus writing the configuration into an AEM page is not possible (since AEM 6.3 reading from pages is supported).

Fortunately the wcm.io toolbox can help us here as well. With the optional “PagePersistenceStrategy” ) you can read and write the configuration in the jcr:content node of the page. The code for is part of the “caconfig.extension” package and should be deployed into AEM, and then a OSGI configuration for io.wcm.caconfig.extensions.persistence.impl.PagePersistenceStrategy needs to be set (enabled=true).

(I udated my github project on ca-config and added all relevant pieces, you just need to enable the configuration for this service in the ui.apps module; I left it turned off so it does not break the functionality I outlined in earlier posts).

But how does this help us here? The problem are the references to the configuration; when you activate a page by default AEM wants to activate also all referenced pages and assets of the page which are not yet activated. But if a reference to a simple node is not considered and never listed.
But this does only work for directly referenced pages. If change a page, and its parent holds the sling:configRef node, the simple ReferenceSearch functionality of AEM does not help. But for this there is a custom ReferenceSearchProvider by wcm.io, which is turned on by default.

Now you have a chance to edit your configuration on author and then activate it afterwards. It’s still a bit clumsy, but at least mangeable as part of an authoring workflow.

And then I discovered a small feature, which has been recently added to the wcm.io Configuration Editor (version 1.3.0). The editor has now a “Publish this page” button, which claims to activate the configuration and all referenced CA Configurations. But unfortunately, it’s not working properly yet. But when it’s fixed, it can help a lot.