On/Off times do not work for DAM Assets

[Dave_Hughes]

We use the on/off times for content, allowing us to activate/publish content prior to when it is meant to be publicly accessible.  When published content is outside of its on/off window, attempts to retrieve the content on the publisher will return a 404, as expected.

We would like to use the same mechanism with DAM assets, so they may be scheduled for the same "on window" as the content that uses them.  Despite the on/off time properties existing in the DAM asset editor, they don't seem to work.  I've tested with both 5.6.1 and 6.1, and the assets continue to be accessible through their direct path (/content/dam/path/to/image.png), as well as through image component references (/content/site/page/_jcr_content/par/image.img.png/3457623456.png).  What gives?  If the on/off times for DAM assets don't control availability, why do these properties exist?

[smacdonald2008]

Here is a KB article that may help:

https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/kb/DamAssetOnTimeOffTimeBehavior.html

As noted in the article - Please raise a Daycare ticket if you have problems to use the feature.

[Dave_Hughes]

The issue is that we don't want to schedule replication of the assets.  The "Activate Later" feature already does exactly that.

The reason we use on/off time with content is because we can replicate the content to publishers, with it remaining inaccessible until the on time is reached.  Doing so ensures that replication queues don't get backed up during time-sensitive releases.  An example:

During international press conferences, we may reveal some new things.  We do not want these to be leaked on our AEM-based websites prior to the conference/reveal, but we do want to align the website reveals to the press conference reveals.  If we try to activate the content at that time, it may be delayed up to a couple minutes if a large amount of other content is being activated in our AEM environments at the same time.  On/off times mitigate this by allowing us to replicate the content to publishers prior to it becoming accessible.  We wish to do the exact same thing with DAM assets.

[Dave_Hughes]

Thanks Scott.

I don't understand why this was implemented differently from content on/off times.  Any thoughts?

[smacdonald2008]

Not sure - i was thinking if this does not work as you like what about creating an AEM workflow that activates and deactivates assets. Then create a scheduler to invoke the workflows - that way you can control exactly when to active assets.

This may make a good use case to base a community article on. 

[Dave_Hughes · Accepted solution]

I've performed some additional investigation.  I've found that the on/off times do work as expected on DAM assets, just not the renditions or any image components that reference them.

If on/off times are set on DAM asset /content/dam/path/to/asset.png, which is then published, then making requests outside of the "on window":

• GET /content/dam/path/to/asset.png -> 404
• GET /content/dam/path/to/asset.png/jcr:content/renditions/original -> 200
• GET /content/project/page/jcr:content/par/imageComponent.img.png -> 200 

I attempted to set the on/off time properties on the asset rendtions, but the properties were not permitted on the nt:resource nodetype.