Issues in sorting the results based on Published Date in AEM

Hello Everyone,

Problem Statement:

Need to sort a page hierarchy based on the last published date. So the page which is

being published last, should be visible first.

The problem looks very simple but it was not that simple. Using an AEM query, pages can be sorted based on "cq:lastReplicated" and it works perfectly fine for the author. But when the code is being deployed in the publish server, the query was not giving same results as author.

Here is the query to sort pages based on cq:lastReplicated:

path=/content/we-retail type=cq:Page orderBy=@jcr:content/cq:lastRelicated orderby.sort=dec

Why the query was not providing the same results in Publish as author?

The publish server doesn't have "cq:lastReplicated" property and that’s how the logic is getting failed.

What I tried?

Approach 1: After a bit research, I found out that "cq:lastReplicationAction, cq:lastReplicated, cq:lastReplicatedBy properties are not carried over the publish by OOTB AEM design". In order to carry these properties, disable this component "com.day.cq.replication.impl.ReplicationPropertiesFilterFactory" in the author instance.

Fig1: com.day.cq.replication.impl.replicationPropertiesFactory Component

The components gets enabled when the server restarts.To make it not getting enabled on server restart, Use "ACS AEM Commons -OSGi Component disabler" OSGi configuration to disable it permanently.

Fig2: ACS AEM Commons-OSGiComponent Disabler COnfiguration

After this, when a page gets activated, all the replication properties started to be carried over to the publishing server and it seems that the problem is solved now, but still the results were not same as expected.

Why this approach didn't work out?

1. If a new page gets created in the author at 2:00 AM and publish the page then there is no cq:lastreplicated in the publish server for the first time.

2. If you have a page being published at 2:00 AM and now you are again publishing it at 3:00, the lastReplicated Date in the publish server will be 2:00 AM because when a node gets replicated from author, first it goes it to publish and then it update the date in author. So by this, publishers were not having the replicated date matched by the author but one step behind the author.

cq:lastReplicated Date in author ≠  cq:lastReplicated Date in publish

So making "cq:lastReplicated" property available to publish didn’t solve the problem.

Approach 2: Then I realized that the "cq:lastReplicated" date in the author is the same as "cq:lastModified" date in publish. Because for publish when it gets the data, it consider that as last modified for the node.Ideally these values will be the same (ignoring seconds), if a page gets published and it immediately goes to the publish server.

Note: publish server don't take the cq:lastModified date from author, but it updates it's own date based on when it gets the data.

It means cq:lastModified date is not carried over to publish from author.

So then how we can conclude this:

cq:lastReplicated Date in author  ≅ cq: lastModified date in publish

Conclusive Points: So now there are two ways:
1. Either you can make your query based on the "cq:lastModified" date for both author/publish  but you need to make the author aware that in author, results are based on last modified but in publish, it will be based on like the last Published date.
2. Or you can make your query based on the run modes. If run mode is author make the query based on "cq:lastreplicated" date. But in case of publish, make the query based on the "cq:last Modified" date.

So that's how Approach 2 solved the issue.

I hope you find it a good read.Thanks and Happy Learning.