Real-Time Search Indexing with AEM Events & App Builder

Streamline search indexing in your AEM projects with real-time updates. This post explores how AEM Events and Adobe App Builder can integrate with external search engines, ensuring content changes are quickly reflected in search results. It’s a scalable, efficient approach to keeping search experiences up to date.

Setup

• Copy the .dist.env file to .env.
• Fill in the values following the comments on the env file.
• This file must not be committed to source control

Local Dev

• aio app run to start your local Dev server
• App will run on localhost:9080 by default

Test & Coverage

• Run aio app test to run unit tests for ui and actions

Deploy & Cleanup

• aio app deploy to build and deploy all actions on Runtime and static files to CDN
• aio app undeploy to undeploy the app

Config

app.config.yaml

• Main configuration file that defines an application's implementation.
• More information on this file, application configuration, and extension configuration can be found here

Action Dependencies

• You have two options to resolve your actions' dependencies:

  1. Packaged action file: Add your action's dependencies to the root package.json and install them using npm install. Then set the function field in app.config.yaml to point to the entry file of your action folder. We will use webpack to package your code and dependencies into a single minified js file. The action will then be deployed as a single file. Use this method if you want to reduce the size of your actions.

  2. Zipped action folder: In the folder containing the action code add a package.json with the action's dependencies. Then set the function field in app.config.yaml to point to the folder of that action. We will install the required dependencies within that directory and zip the folder before deploying it as a zipped action. Use this method if you want to keep your action's dependencies separated.

Debugging in VS Code

While running your local server (aio app run), both UI and actions can be debugged, to do so open the vscode debugger and select the debugging configuration called WebAndActions. Alternatively, there are also debug configs for only UI and each separate action.

Typescript support for UI

To use typescript use .tsx extension for react components and add a tsconfig.json and make sure you have the below config added

 {
  "compilerOptions": {
      "jsx": "react"
    }
  }