DocumentationAEM as a Cloud ServiceUser Guide

Experience Fragments

Last update: Mon Dec 04 2023 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Within Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, an Experience Fragment:

  • is a group of one or more components
  • includes both content and layout
  • can be referenced within pages
  • can contain any component

An Experience Fragment:

  • Is a part of an experience (page).
  • Can be used across multiple pages.
  • Is based on a template (editable only) to define structure and components.
  • This template is used to create the root page of the Experience Fragment.
  • Is made up of one or more components, with layout, in a paragraph system.
  • Can contain other experience fragments.
  • Can be combined with other components (including other Experience Fragments) to form a complete page (experience).
  • One, or more, variations can be created, based on the root page.
  • These variations may share content and/or components.
  • Can be broken down into building blocks that can be used across multiple variations of the fragment.

You can use Experience Fragments:

  • If an author wants to re-use parts (a fragment of an experience) of a page.
    Without Experience Fragments, the author would need to copy and paste that fragment. Creating and maintaining these copy/paste experiences is time-consuming and prone to user errors.
    Experience Fragments eliminate the need for copy/paste.
  • To support the headless CMS use-case.
    Authors want to use AEM only for authoring but not for delivering to the customer. A third-party system/touchpoint would consume that experience and then deliver to the user.
NOTE
Content Fragments and Experience Fragments are different features within AEM:
  • Content Fragments are editorial content, with definition and structure, but without additional visual design and/or layout. They can be used to access structured data, including texts, numbers, and dates, amongst others.
  • Experience Fragments are fully laid out content; a fragment of a web page.
Experience Fragments can contain content in the form of Content Fragments, but not the other way around.
For more information, see Understanding Content Fragments and Experience Fragments in AEM.
NOTE
Write access for experience fragments requires the user account to be registered in the group:
  • experience-fragments-editors
Contact your system administrator if you are experiencing any issues.

When Should You Use Experience Fragments?

Experience Fragments should be used:

  • Whenever you want to reuse experiences.

    • Experiences that are reused with same or similar content.

  • When you use AEM as a content delivery platform for third parties.

    • Any solution that wants to use AEM as the content delivery platform.
    • Embedding content in third-party touchpoints.

  • If you have an Experience with different variations or renditions.

    • Channel or context-specific variations.
    • Experiences that make sense to group; for example, a campaign with different experiences across channels.

  • When you use Omnichannel Commerce.

    • Making touchpoints transactional.

Organizing your Experience Fragments

It is recommended to:

Creating folders lets you:

  • create a meaningful structure for your Experience Fragments; for example, according to classification

    note note
    NOTE
    It is not necessary to align the structure of your Experience Fragments with the page structure of your site.

  • allocate the allowed templates at the folder level

    note note
    NOTE
    You can use the template editor to create your own template.

The WKND project structures some Experience Fragments according to Contributors. The structure used also illustrates how other features, such as Multi Site Management (including language copies), can be used.

See:

http://localhost:4502/aem/experience-fragments.html/content/experience-fragments/wknd/language-masters/en/contributors/kumar-selveraj/master

Folders for Experience Fragments

Creating and Configuring a Folder for your Experience Fragments

To create and configure a folder for your Experience Fragments it is recommended to:

  1. Create a folder.

  2. Configure the allowed Experience Fragment templates for that folder.

NOTE
It is also possible to configure the Allowed Templates for your instance, but this method is not recommended as the values can be overwritten upon upgrade.

Configure the Allowed Templates for your Folder

NOTE
This is the recommended method for specifying the Allowed Templates, as the values will not be overwritten upon upgrade.

  1. Navigate to the required Experience Fragments folder.

  2. Select the folder, and then Properties.

  3. Specify the regular expression for retrieving the required templates in the Allowed Templates field.

    For example:
    /conf/(.*)/settings/wcm/templates/experience-fragment(.*)?

    See:
    http://localhost:4502/mnt/overlay/cq/experience-fragments/content/experience-fragments/folderproperties.html/content/experience-fragments/wknd

    Experience Fragment Properties - Allowed Templates

    note note
    NOTE
    See Templates for Experience Fragments for further details.

  4. Select Save and Close.

Configure the Allowed Templates for your Instance

CAUTION
It is not recommended to change the Allowed Templates by this method, as the templates specified can be overwritten upon upgrade.
Use this dialog box for information purposes only.

  1. Navigate to the required Experience Fragments console.

  2. Select Configuration options:

    Configuration button

  3. Specify the required templates in the Configure Experience Fragments dialog:

    Configure Experience Fragments

    note note
    NOTE
    See Templates for Experience Fragments for further details.

  4. Select Save.

Creating an Experience Fragment

To create an Experience Fragment:

  1. Select Experience Fragments from the Global Navigation.

    Experience Fragments in the Navigation panel

  2. Navigate to the required folder and select Create:

    Creating a folder for Experience Fragments

  3. Select Experience Fragment to open the Create Experience Fragment wizard.

    Select the required Template, then Next:

    Selecting an Experience Fragment template

  4. Enter the Properties for your Experience Fragment.

    A Title is mandatory. If the Name is left blank it is derived from the Title.

    Experience Fragment properties

    note note
    NOTE
    Tags from the Experience Fragment template will not be merged with tags on this Experience Fragment root page.
    These are completely separate.

  5. Click Create.

    A message is displayed. Select:

    • Done to return to the console
    • Open to open the fragment editor

Editing your Experience Fragment

The Experience Fragment Editor offers you similar capabilities to the normal page editor.

NOTE
See Editing Page Content for more information on how to use the page editor.

The following example procedure illustrates how to create a teaser for a product:

  1. Drag and drop the required component from the Components Browser.

  2. Depending on the component:

    • Add any content and/or assets as required.
    • Configure the properties as required.

  3. Add more components as required.

For example: http://<host>:<port>/editor.html/content/experience-fragments/wknd/language-masters/en/contributors/stacey-roswells/master.html

Experience Fragment on page

Creating An Experience Fragment Variation

You can create variations of your Experience Fragment, depending on your needs:

  1. Open your fragment for editing.

  2. Open the Variations tab.

    Creating an Experience Fragment variation

  3. Create lets you create:

    • Variation
    • Variation as live-copy.

  4. Define the required properties:

    • Template
    • Title
    • Name - if left blank it is derived from the Title
    • Description
    • Variation tags

    For example:

    Variation properties

  5. Confirm with Done, the new variation is shown in the panel.

Using your Experience Fragment

You can now use your Experience Fragment when authoring your pages:

  1. Open any page for editing.

  2. Create an instance of the Experience Fragment component, within the page paragraph system:

  3. Add the actual Experience Fragment to the component instance; either:

    • Drag the required fragment from the Assets Browser and drop onto the component.
    • Select Configure from the component toolbar and specify the fragment to use, confirm with Done.
    note note
    NOTE
    Edit, in the component toolbar, operates as a shortcut to open the fragment in the fragment editor.

For example: http://<host>:<port>/editor.html/content/wknd/language-masters/en/about-us.html

Experience Fragment in Page Editor

Building Blocks

You can select one or more components to create a building block for recycling within your fragment:

Creating a Building Block

To create a Building Block:

  1. In the Experience Fragment editor, select the components you want to re-use:

    Select component for Building Block

  2. From the components toolbar, select Convert to building block:

    Building Block button

  3. Enter the name of the Building Block, and confirm with Convert:

    Name Building Block

  4. The Building Block is shown in the left tab (Local), and can be selected for further action:

    Building Block in the rail

Managing a Building Block

Your building block is visible in the Building Blocks tab. For each block, the following actions are available:

  • Go to master: open the root page variation in a new tab
  • Rename
  • Delete

Managing Building Blocks

Using a Building Block

You can drag your building block to the paragraph system of any fragment, as with any component.

When editing an Experience Fragment available Building Blocks are displayed in the left-hanf tab. You can filter according to:

  • Local - Building Blocks from the current Experience Fragment
  • All - Building Blocks from all fragments

Selecting Building Blocks

Personalization on your Experience Fragment

Personalization on your Experience Fragment allows you, as a marketer, to define target audiences for the Experience Fragment just once, then re-use the fragment in any page. This:

  • eliminates the need to specify the required variations for each audience every time the fragment is used
  • maintains styling across the offers

You can create an Experience Fragment with multiple components grouped inside this single fragment. You can also create variations of the fragment for each specific audience segment, then reuse these Experience Fragments across the required channels.

Personalization is achieved by defining the Personalization properties on either the Experience Fragment or variation, or the folder containing the fragments; this means that inheritance can override personalization properties.

Configuring these properties also enables the Targeting mode in the Experience Fragment editor.

Defining Personalization for your Experience Fragment

To personalize your fragment:

  1. Navigate to the required location in the Experience Fragments console.

  2. Select either a folder or your fragment, then Properties from the toolbar.

    note note
    NOTE
    Personalization properties defined on a folder are inherited by all child folders down through the sub-tree, and Experience Fragments (and variations) within that sub-tree. They can be overridden by breaking the inheritance.

  3. Open the Personalization tab to define and save your settings. For example, on a folder:

    Experience Fragment - Personlization Properties

    note caution
    CAUTION
    When a fragment is embedded in a Sites page, and Personalization has been configured, then only the personalization version of the page is used at page rendering time.
    For the targeting performed on the components in a fragment to work at page rendering, the following conditions must be met:
    The ContextHub Path selected in the Personalization tab must be either:

    • the same path as the one configured for the page where the fragment is rendered

      Or:

    • a path that contains a subset of the stores defined in the ContextHub configured for the page
    The Segments Path selected in the Personalization tab must be either:

    • the same path as the one configured for the page where the fragment is rendered

      Or

    • a path that contains a subset of the segments configured for the page

Defining Targeting for your Experience Fragment

After the personalization properties are configured, the Targeting mode is available when the fragment is opened for editing.

Experience Fragment Editor - Targeting mode

This mode operates in the same manner as for page editing. See Targeting mode for the Page Editor for more details.

Details of your Experience Fragment

Details of your fragment can be seen:

  1. Navigate to the location of your Experience Fragments (do not navigate further down to the variations within the fragment).
    Details are shown in all views of the Experience Fragments console, with the List View including details of an export to Target:

    Experience Fragment details

  2. When you open the Properties of the Experience Fragment:

    Properties button

    The properties are available in various tabs:

    note caution
    CAUTION
    These tabs are shown when you open Properties from the Experience Fragments console.
    If you Open Properties when editing an Experience Fragment, the appropriate Page Properties are shown.

    Experience Fragment properties

    • Basic

      • Title - mandatory
      • Description
      • Tags
      • Total number of variants - information only
      • Number of web variants - information only
      • Number of non-web variants - information only
      • Number of pages using this fragment - information only

    • Cloud Services

      • Cloud Configuration
      • Cloud Service Configurations
      • Facebook page ID
      • Pinterest board

    • References

      • A list of references

    • Personalization

      • ContextHub Path
      • Segments Path
      • Brand

The Plain HTML Rendition

Using the .plain. selector in the URL, you can access the plain HTML rendition from the browser.

NOTE
Although this is directly available from the browser, the primary purpose is to allow other applications (for example, third-party web apps, custom mobile implementations) to access the content of the Experience Fragment directly, using only the URL.

Publishing Experience Fragments

Publishing your Experience Fragment is basically the same as publishing a page (though from the Experience Fragments console or editor).

Alternatively you can also publish to Preview (again from the Experience Fragments console or editor).

Exporting Experience Fragments

By default, Experience Fragments are delivered in the HTML format. This can be used by both AEM and third-party channels alike.

For export to Adobe Target, JSON can also be used. See:

fbcff2a9-b6fe-4574-b04a-21e75df764ab