Schema App Connector for AEM Overview

Modified on Tue, 6 Aug at 7:01 PM

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a comprehensive content management solution for building websites, mobile apps, and forms.

The Schema App Connector for AEM was created to serve a growing subset of our customers who host their websites on AEM. The connector allows our customers to get JSON-LD server-side, which increases schema markup deliverability and reduces client page rendering time. With this integration method, our customers are able to deploy up-to-date schema markup to their websites at scale.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Technical Design
Permissions & Services
Security Features
Installation Guides
Additional Resources

Technical Design

The Schema App connector for AEM locally caches your Schema Markup so it can be deployed with the rest of your content when the page is rendered. This provides greater assurance your schema markup will load in time for Search engines.

Integration

The first step in the process is integrating with AEM using one of the following methods:

If you choose to use the JavaScript option, AEM will inject highlight.js into your pages when you add the configuration to your site. If you chose the Crawler option, once the configuration is added to your pages you can start a crawl to begin deployment.

[Fig. 1] Initial Setup Flow

After installing the plugin, you (the AEM author) can log in to AEM, create a new configuration, and add the details you copied from Schema App.

Next, you will submit the details to Schema App to register the AEM URL.

Schema App will return a Success response if the account details and URL are correct.

You will add the newly created configuration to the respective sites where you want the plugin enabled.

Lastly, you will publish the AEM page where we have configured the plugin.

The Schema App AEM Connector is now ready to receive Schema Markup webhooks.

JSON-LD Injection

Once the registration is all set up, the process of inserting and updating JSON-LD can proceed.

[Fig. 2] JSON-LD Injection Flow

The AEM Scheduler runs on a predetermined schedule to make calls to the Schema App API data for each page. This scheduler runs on both the Author and Publisher instance so any data updates on the Author are replicated with the markup.
Once a response is received from the DATA API call, if it's not blank we will find that page in AEM, and create a 'schemaapp' node under the page node and set the JSON-LD. If a node already exists then the JSON-LD is stored and updated.
After updating JSON-LD in the page node, we will make a call to the AEM dispatcher to clear the cache for that particular page. This request is sent from the Publisher instance as shown above.
Once a user visits the website URL (e.g. page1), a request first comes to the Dispatcher as we have already cleared the cache for page1, and redirects to the Publisher. In the Publisher, there is a JSP script (headlibs.jsp) that will conditionally insert the JSON-LD Schema Markup into the head tag of the page if the Schema App node exists under the page node. This leverages the apache sling framework that AEM is based on. This JSP is invoked only after setting up the Schema App configuration in Author instance upon plugin installation. Additionally, this injection only occurs for non-headless installations.

NOTE: When a new page is published from the Author, JSON-LD is not removed. This is because the Scheduler runs on both Publisher and Author, and therefore, the JCR, when replicated to the Publisher, will include the markup.

Headless AEM

For decoupled AEM, when a user requests a page, the request will be served by the front end (React JS or Angular JS). The AEM front end will call the page.model.json API and fetch the page content as JSON.

When the response is received from the API, scripts are created and added to the HTML header section. Subsequent API calls to the JSON API generate and insert the required Schema Markup on the page.

[Fig 3.] Example of Sample script

Cache Invalidation

In general, invalidating the dispatcher cache will not be necessary. Schema App will send a request when the markup is updated.

Permissions & Services

The below table highlights the permissions and services that will be required for the plugin to work efficiently.

Path	Read	Modify	Create	Notes
/content*	✔	✔	✔	To create Schema App JSON-LD data node under page content node.
/etc/cloudservices*	✔	✔		To create and read Schema App config

Function	Role
Author	API registration
Publisher	Receives requests from the dispatcher.
Scheduler	Makes calls to the Schema App CDN.

User Permissions: Content-author access is required to create new Cloud configurations. No other special access is required.

Security Features

The source of JSON-LD is validated by the Schema App connector to ensure that malicious scripts or JSON-LD can not be injected into a website.
Schema App optimizes content visible on the web, primarily public data. The script is not able to change website content. See Schema App's Privacy Policy.
Validation of metadata and content of JSON-LD