Accessing and Delivering Content Fragments Headless Quick Start Guide accessing-delivering-content-fragments

Learn how to use AEM’s Assets REST API to manage Content Fragments and the GraphQL API for headless delivery of Content Fragment content.

What are GraphQL and Assets REST APIs? what-are-the-apis

Now that you have created some content fragments, you can use AEM’s APIs to deliver them headlessly.

The remainder of this guide focuses on GraphQL access and Content Fragment delivery.

How to Deliver a Content Fragment Using GraphQL how-to-deliver-a-content-fragment

Information architects must design queries for their channel endpoints to deliver content. These queries only must be considered once per endpoint per model. For the purposes of this getting started guide, you only must create one.

  1. Log into AEM and access the GraphiQL interface:

    • For example: http://<host>:<port>/aem/graphiql.html.
  2. The GraphiQL is an in-browser query editor for GraphQL. You can use it to build queries to retrieve Content Fragments to deliver them heedlessly as JSON.

    • The left panel lets you build your query.
    • The right panel displays the results.
    • The query editor features code completion and hotkeys to easily execute the query.
      GraphiQL editor
  3. Assuming that the model you created was called person with fields firstName, lastName, and position, you can build a simple query to retrieve the content of the Content Fragment.

    code language-text
    query
    {
      personList {
        items {
          _path
          firstName
          lastName
          position
        }
      }
    }
    
  4. Enter the query into the left panel.

  5. Click the Execute Query (right arrow) icon or use the Ctrl-Enter hotkey and the results are displayed as JSON in the right panel.
    GraphiQL results

  6. Click:

    • Docs at the top-right of the page to show in-context documentation to help you build your queries which adapt to your own models.
    • History in the top toolbar to show previous queries.
    • Save As and Save to save your queries, after which you can list and retrieve them from the Persisted Queries panel and Publish.
      GraphiQL documentation

GraphQL enables structured queries that can target not only specific data sets or individual data objects, but can also deliver specific elements of the objects, nested results, offers support for query variables, and much more.

GraphQL can avoid iterative API requests and over-delivery. Instead, it allows for bulk delivery of exactly what is needed for rendering as a response to a single API query. The resulting JSON can be used to deliver data to other sites or apps.

Next Steps next-steps

That’s it! You now have a basic understanding of headless content management in AEM. There are many more resources where you can dive deeper for a comprehensive understanding of the features available.

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