Smartview Extension Deployment

Yosi Maurer

I try to understand how to deploy an extension to the server. I can deploy a custom widget successfully. I did not find how to deploy an extension for an existing widget such as in the “Add hello” sample from SDK.

Adding the extension code including it’s extension.json file inside a deployed widget did not work.

Jacopo

I'm not sure exactly what you're doing, but as I'm sure you're aware, when it comes to deployment, you need to do it across all servers in your architecture (even if it is just front-end, as your load balancer might forward you to a server unaffected by your changes). You need to be mindful of the cache, restart services if you've made changes that require the code to be loaded or interpreted at startup, and so on. Also, modifying core code is never the best practice in terms of system maintainability and total cost of ownership; it's better to extend and keep your custom components under control.

Creating new widgets or customizing existing ones can be tedious and expensive. However, if you're working on an instance that already has the Module Suite, you can easily create new widgets through drag-and-drop, handle much of what you would normally do programmatically via control panels, and if you really need to go low-level, you can use a Content Script controller (Groovy based), where you have access to all the standard xECM functionalities and thousands of additional functions and APIs.

The best part is that for deployment, you only need to do it on one server in the architecture, and the others will automatically inherit it. You don't even need to restart any services.

Jacopo Malnati