AEM URL Shortening: Sling Mappings vs Dispatcher Rewrites

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AEM URL Shortening: Sling Mappings vs Dispatcher Rewrites

by @daniel-strmecki

Overview

URL shortening or mapping is a crucial aspect of modern web development, so the same is valid in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) projects. Short and user-friendly URLs improve user experience, enhance SEO, and ensure consistency across multiple channels. AEM default URLs are not SEO optimized, as they always contain the extra "/content" path prefix, as well as usually a path to the site or market. Let's not forget the unnecessary .html suffix. Here is an example default AEM URL to a page:

• http://www.meticulous.digital/content/meticulous/uk/en.html

Usually, we aim to make the URLs shorter and keep only the necessary parts, like:

• http://www.meticulous.digital/uk/en

AEM provides two primary mechanisms for achieving URL shortening or mapping: Sling Mappings and Dispatcher Rewrites. In this article, we'll explore how to achieve the desired behavior using both approaches. We'll compare their configurations, use cases, advantages, and limitations to help you make informed decisions for your AEM projects.

Key Points

Both Sling Mappings and Dispatcher Rewrites are powerful tools for URL shortening and mapping in AEM. While Sling Mappings excels in flexibility and integration with AEM’s resource resolver, Dispatcher Rewrites provides a simple solution with better performance for static mappings. The choice ultimately depends on your project’s requirements, including URL dynamics, performance needs, and ease of maintenance. By choosing the right solution wisely, we can deliver user-friendly URLs and efficient URL management in our AEM applications.

In case you are not sure which solution is the best choice for your project, my personal favorite is Dispatcher Rewrites. As this solution is simpler to set up and maintain, it is usually a better choice for simple URL shorting use cases. This is especially true if the AEM server doesn't need to be aware of the domain configuration. Also, receiving a full path to every resource will make debugging AEM requests easier.

Full Article

Read the full article on https://meticulous.digital/blog/f/aem-url-shortening-sling-mappings-vs-dispatcher-rewrites to find out more.

Q&A

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