Leveraging Authoring experience in external applications

[abhisheks351843]

Does anyone know or has worked upon externalizing the authoring experience from AEM in an custom app?

Like say I have a component X and I want it's authoring view to be embedded into this custom app which is accessible to users that are not authors. The idea is for the user to be able to use the dialog and the view without having AEM access/knowledge.

[Asutosh_Jena_]

Hi @abhisheks351843 

When you say externalizing the authoring experience, what exactly you mean by this?

AEM Authoring experience is for the authors/users who can add/update/create content on AEM environment and it can be pushed to publish for the end user view.

Are you expecting the same content authoring experience to be used in a different application? If so, it will not be possible as the authoring experience will work only on AEM instance and for this you need to be logged in to AEM author environment. Also the content that is authored will be stored on AEM application only using the regular node/resource structure and it will be rendered by the Sling engine which I belive is not in case of your custom application.

Thanks!

[abhisheks351843]

What I want to achieve is to be able to use the component dialogs of an AEM application which shows up on author from an application outside of AEM to generate the content. Now this application does not necessarily have to save that content into AEM directly and it can use some local storage but the template should let the external app users know what inputs need to be provided for the page/component and how the page will appear with the values they have added.

[VeenaVikraman]

@abhisheks351843 I am afraid that won't be possible. AEM dialogs are designed using Coral UI / jQuery which is served from AEM. Means , all the underlying files are hosted and served from your AEM instance. It can be accessible only from AEM. Even if assuming you can achieve this ( Again I am 99.9% sure this can't be achieved ) , it is really not the right practice to do it for all the security reasons you can name. 

[Hemalatha]

AEM is primarily designed to give you authoring capability for you web site content. If you want to externalize this, then you have to develop a custom application which will have custom authoring capability which is not a ideal practice. 

[abhisheks351843]

yeah. but i was wondering if there is a way to use the dialogs developed for the native app residing in AEM. I think this would require reverse engineering Coral UI and sling to read the component from AEM and rendering it in an external app. I was hoping that someone might have already done something like this or if there was a package available that would support it.

[abhisheks351843]

also idea practice depends on the use case I think. When I just want to source my content from an external source with them having knowledge or access on AEM this may be a genuine way to harness information without compromising the content in the first place. I could then have a workflow read the content from the external source, validate it and create my pages on the fly.