I wasn't very clear there. We'll author the actual page for data entry but once the page is authored, our users will have to open the the page in preview mode and use it for the data entry. The data will be stored in jcr, published and available to the external application as api.  Ideally, we would...

That's one of the options we are thiking, the authors will be adding the list of attendees and other fields and save/edit those entries on regular basis, there are few pages with similar related fields that needs to be stored in jcr as well. Authoring will have to be done in a preview mode (wcmmode=...

I'm designing an application (few pages) for users to create some structured content which will be exposed to a third party application as an API providing the data as json response. I'm using AEM cloud service and I have to store the data in AEM itself (jcr or dam), I'm hesitant on storing the cont...

Hopefully, you found the answer already. If not, try renaming your farm file with the different prefix like zzz_ to zzz_digital.farm, so that it's placed earlier in order than your default publish farm.