What’s the Most Underrated AEM Feature You Can’t Live Without?

[AmitVishwakarma]

Everyone talks about Core Components, Cloud Service, and AI… but what about the hidden gems?

• Is there a little-known feature you use daily that saves tons of time?
• A workflow hack? A deployment trick? A authoring shortcut?
• Something that made you say, “Why didn’t I know about this earlier?!”

Share your secret weapons!

[donquixote_dofl]

I always feared when I am working with dependencies, aem integration with third party tools, there are times because of my changes the instance totally got broken. From then till the day I learnt a hack from one of the senior I always carefully measured my changes. Once i got to know about the tip then onwards I recklessly added the changes to observe how the aem instance will behave with out any fear about breaking and setting the instance again.

the tip & hack that saved huge time: You can bring back the working instance by modifying the journal in crx-repository/segmentstore/journal file .... just open the file named data(where the modified date should be your proper instance working day) with notepad and there will be the id, copy it and find that id in journal then delete the items present after that id. Restart the instance. BOOM instance is back.
I am technically unaware of the flow and how this entire thing works, haven't had the time to dig into this particular hack. But I loved it from then. 🙂

[AnjaneaiSri]

Well, there are a few for me. But the most important was leveraging Groovy Console to interact with JCR-

The ability to install and leverage groovy admin console (/apps/groovyconsole) to execute tasks and query directly on JCR was a game changer. In my case, we had written a servlet to create content fragments and as the project progressed, performance was degrading due to the servlet performance.Hence, I switched to groovy script to bulk create content fragments made a huge difference, really easy to write and maintain and works perfectly.

On top of that, I use groovy frequently to query through JCR and bulk update properties of multiple nodes in a go. 

You can get started here --> https://github.com/CID15/aem-groovy-console