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Understanding on/off, expiry and scheduled activation/decativation for AEM assets.

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Level 6

Hello all


I'm trying to understand the differences and usecases of on/off and expiry time for assets. The setup that I have in place is an author instance and a dynamic media server configured to the author. And I'm on AEMaaCS.

Problem 1
When an asset is published/unpublished from author, it gets published/unpublished from the DM as well. This activity updates the CRX properties to either Activate or Deactivate based on the operation carried out,
1. cq:lastReplicationAction
2. cq:lastReplicationAction_publish
3. cq:lastReplicationAction_scene7

Properties 1 and 2 are working as expected, for both publication/unpublication. Property 3 gets updated to Activate when an asset is published from author, but it doesn't change back to Deactivate when the same is unpublished. I've verified in DM that the asset got deactivated, but for some reasons the property is not getting updated in AEM. Any thoughts why?

Problem 2

I understand that the scheduled activation/deactivation works based on the corresponding workflows, where the asset gets published/unpublished when the specified time reaches. And it correctly updates the properties 1 and 2( and not 3).

When it comes to on/off time, it doesn't seem to publish/unpublish the asset. The asset remains in it's current state, and thus the properties 1,2 and 3. 

And what I understood from the community regarding on/off time is:

  • On/Off  You will activate the page and the resource ( nodes) will be available in publish. The Page will not be accessible till the set time or it will be available only during the set time. Resource will be present in the publish all during and after this time

The question here is, does it not work with dynamic media the same way it does with publish instance?

And regarding the expiry time:
What happens when the expiry is reached? Does it unpublish the asset from DM and update the properties 1,2 and 3 to Deactivate? I did not see this happen.

Basically I would like the authors to setup the on/off time at which the asset needs to get published/unpublished. And it looks like it can't be achieved with on/off time, but with scheduled publication/unpublication. The problem with scheduled publication/unpublication is that it is cumbersome to setup when dealing with a very large number of assets where individual assets would be having different scheduled times and there's no information of these scheduled dates in the asset/metadata properties(neither in CRX nor in the assets UI - You won't be able to see which all assets are getting published/unpublished when), unlike on and off time. Ideally I would want the assets to be published/unpublished based on on/off/expiry time or with some other metadata properties rather than scheduling the workflows.


Is there a better way to approach this? 

Thanks







1 Reply

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Level 6

@kautuk_sahni Do you might have any insights here? Thanks