Looking to setup a dispatcher in front of AEM author to show pages with wcmmode=disabled

[joed62279101]

I am looking for a way to preview unpublished pages on an author and view them in wcmmode = disabled so someone without AEM access can view a page in progress before it's published. 

One of the approaches I have heard of is to put a dispatcher in front of the author instance and set headers to pass wcmmode=disabled and set a remote_user to some ID that has read only access to content.

Has anyone done that? I have tried all sorts of things to pass these parameters as request headers/parameter from dispatcher to author instance but nothing works. Can someone point me in the right direction and either validate or shoot down this approach?

thanks

[smacdonald2008 · Accepted solution]

The email sent simply contains a link to the URL on the staged server where the reviewers can view the staged content. It works nicely and great way for a team to view content  prior to publishing live.  Building the work flow is extra work however.      

[smacdonald2008]

Dispatcher is a cache tool and load balancing tool.

https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/dispatcher.html

What you want to do is more of a query operation - query and view unpublished pages.

Personally - i have not heard of using Dispatcher for this purpose. However - i will check internally.  

[Jörg_Hoh]

Hi,

So do I understand you right, that you want people to preview (unpublished) pages in an AEM authoring instance without authentication? What's the reason for this? And do you make sure, that these people can only preview the pages you want them to preview (maybe there are areas, which shouldn't be available via such an mechanism)?

I don't think that this is a really good idea, as full anonymous read access might createa problems, on the other there are cases, where the license cost is charged per seat. So in that you can see this as an approach bypass the terms of the license.

kind regards,
Jörg

[joed62279101]

Jörg Hoh wrote...

Hi,

So do I understand you right, that you want people to preview (unpublished) pages in an AEM authoring instance without authentication? What's the reason for this? And do you make sure, that these people can only preview the pages you want them to preview (maybe there are areas, which shouldn't be available via such an mechanism)?

I don't think that this is a really good idea, as full anonymous read access might createa problems, on the other there are cases, where the license cost is charged per seat. So in that you can see this as an approach bypass the terms of the license.

kind regards,
Jörg

I was told by an Adobe sales rep that licensing would not be an issue as no authoring work would done.

[joed62279101]

Thank you for your reply. I am quite familiar with dispatcher and it's functionality. At Adobe summit last year during one of the sessions I attended someone mentioned using dispatcher in this way which is why I am looking into it.

The business requirements is to view a page on author how it would look published.

I want to view:

http://publisher:4502/content/mysite/mypage.html?wcmmode=disabled

As:

http://webserver/content/mysite/mypage.html

so a marketer can review the content before the author publishes it.

So I'm not looking to query for unpublished pages, I know the page but want to view it in wcmmode=disabled without having to add that parameter and without a user having to log in.

[smacdonald2008]

At Adobe - we have workflows that publish pages to a staging server just for that purpose. Only internal ppl can view those pages. Once they are happy - we publish live with another workflow.

I would explore that route - using workflows and publish to a staging server as opposed to trying to use Dispatcher to view unpublished pages. That way - an author can publish to a staged server - then the marketers will get an email with the URL to the page on stage. A setup like that may meet your business requirements. This meets our internal requirements (which are similar) and it works nicely.  

[joed62279101]

Thanks for your response. I have experimented with that route. I didn't know Adobe had workflows for this so I built my own that do just that. In practice though, that process is really clumsy for authors and there is no easy way to keep that other publisher maintained and no easy visual clue for an author to know what has been published to a stage server and what has not. That approach requires a lot of extra code to make it a clean process and I was hoping to avoid that at the moment.

[Jörg_Hoh]

@Scott: This is a working approach, but it is clumsy when you think about approval workflows. When you send the links via emails to the approvers, it's likely that you get your approval via email (which breaks any kind of automated process), or the approver needs to preview it on the preview system and then login into the author to approve the change via a workflow. Both ways are far from ideal.