Reporting on Component in AEM

Up untill now maintaining a AEM Component Lists such as this AEM Capability Matrix - OOTB Components has been a daunting task. Not only does it require  continuous re-alignment but it also requires refactoring which is a time consuming effort, and can be seen as one with limited use.

Any way you look at this, the need for this is there and with many target usages. You may want to track components being added to your instance by your Vendors. You may be looking at Authoring experience impact by components that don't have Icons or meaningful Titles, or even worse Authorable components that are missing dialogs. Or you can be a new adopter on a journey of exploration though the hard of AEM.

Whatever the use case is you will need data, raw data, report data and graphs! Raw data you can use in combination with your Excel wizardry, report data you can use as a discussion point with your team and graphs! Graphs you can use by adding them to your cool presentations showing your findings.

It would appear that the need for this kind of experience has been noted and with the release of AEM 6.2 this has been given so much attention that it now has its own Experience as Component Console! Its located under Tools -> General - Components Or you can use quick search by pressing “/” (Forward Slash) and typing components

This new experience has the same familiar look and feel to it you come to expect. It has two selection view and one details view.

Card View

Present the component in Card notation with colors for categories. This is a similar view an author see in component finder when page Authoring. This shows same content Title and Component Category.

List View

This view as usual takes the same content but displays in a list but with same exactly same content exposed.

On both of these views pressing Content Only button

(top left conner under AEM logo) will bring up a search panel. With this handy feature you can find component you are looking for in a flash. With this feature no component is hidden from your fingertips.

In addition to these listing views a new details view is accessible by clicking the component. This view show additional information for the component you would expect to see, those are located on Properties tab.

Policies

Shows you Policies that have this component in their Definition for particular Template. This is good to see which policies impact component appearance on Pages. As with policies you can hide components from Authors and from actually appearing on Pages, even if component is present. You can read more about this on Creating Page Templates.

Live Usage

Shows you current pages where the component is being used. This is good view to see usage of component. This may get busy if you pick very Author useful component.

So as you can see the capability that exposes all of the components available to your authoring needs is there. You can now search, identify and report on components and their usage. As with all features that come out on the AEM Platform the foundation is there and many more features can be added as they are need by the community.

One of those features that is reporting capability. Looking at newly added reporting experiences the the Asset Reporting and Health Monitoring reports show a glimpse what is yet to come and possible when it comes to report presentation and features.

Asset Reports

Allow export of report content to CSV, you have a myriad of search options and ability to select columns you want to view/export.

Health Monitoring

Another report that show data over time on interactive graph and ability to pick configuration points is a good touch.

Additional Reporting

You will also find Health Reports that show textual representation of multitude of reporting touch points, these are great for use by human and automated monitoring system. As well as Community reports that present a view of User Generated Content contributed on your social sites.

 

The foundations for having adequate OOTB reporting is there and majority of uses are covered amply. And in case you need to do more data that is not currently exposed though the OOTB report experiences, you can always leverage the OOTB Classic Reporting features that exist still. Look at current feature set it would see that ultimate replacement is ahead and as eagerly awaited it is, you still could use it to do some advanced reporting without a lot of development.

Classic Reporting

This feature has been a long standing fallback for content reports, is has been around for a long time and it name touts is Classic UI presentation. It does look different compared to what now is normal AEM UI, but it does have some distinct features. Did I mention graphs and barcharts? Classic Reports are accessible on your AEM instance in the Classic UI, to get there Point at project icon on your dashboard and click the Classic UI icon.

From there you will be taken to the Classic AEM welcome screen on which in the Right column you can find Reports link.

Classic UI Reports

Finding yourself on reports tree you will be presented with a list of existing OOTB reports as well as all the new reports that your team would create for your usage. Each of the report in the list would have been created by an author from a Report Template which is built by a developer.

Here you can see OOTB Reports as well as new Custom built component reports:

• Component Group List Report - show grouping of reports by category for tracking
• Component List Report - show list of all reports for tracking
• Component List - show list of all components for export

All of these reports use the same new custom template:

• Component List Report Template - use this report generator to create a new Component List reports

In addition to Report Templates developers can build new Report Components that expose particular metadata from content. When new Report Component are created they are added to the Template Design and they appear in Sidekick as normal component ready to be added to reports.

Here you can see some new Custom build fields that can bu built that expose Component content into reports:

• Component Group - component category group
• Description - component description
• Title - component title
• Has Classic Dialog - does component have classic dialog
• Has Classic Dialog Design - does component have classic design dialog
• Has Dialog - does component have touch ui dialog
• Has Embedded ClientLibs - does component have local clientlibs
• Has Icon - does component have an icon
• Last Modified - last time component was modified
• Resource Type - type of component
• Sling Resource Super Type - which component is being inherited
• Sling Resource Type - which service being triggered for this component
• Allowed Parents - paths where component is allowed to be used
• Component Path - component location

These fields expose additional information from component that can help you manage quality of Authoring Experience that is being developed by your developers. This content can be used a reporting touch points every month to make sure the team is exposing all component to authors. It can also be used to monitor if component have missing dialogs or configuration settings. For reporting purpose you can also create charts to show component grouping counts by groups, which would be handy on multi team/project platforms.

The features and capabilities of this reporting tool are not easily replaced so it's good to see that replacement is not rushed. The UI itself uses traditional technology and look&feel but don’t let that discourage you. It's targeted to appeal with is Excel Pivot-Table similarities. If this is too much for you then look at it like a table with Pie and Line Chart, everyone likes those. Range of features from grouping, sorting and filtering allow enable this tool to create comprehensive reports showing off work progress by your team.  

In addition to UI feature you are able to schedule these reports and run them over time against data collected by the report scheduler. This allows for a very deep and meaningful conversations with your authors and developers.

You can read more about all of the available feature on Official Reporting page.

From technology perspective under the covers it has less moving parts as it leaves a lot of functions up to the Front End framework to handle. So this means that you can build the reports quicker but they all look similar, as the presentation framework is the same across all reports. Which is similar to Excel where Pivot Table always looks and behaves the same no matter who makes it. So this applies well in Back Office reporting situations. You can find more information and examples of a Report Project and its code on the project site Reporting on Component in AEM or search for it in Adobe Package Share.

Final Thoughts

It’s clear that at Adobe interesting things are being developed behind the scenes, to enable Authors and Organisation to leverage and do more with content they generate in AEM. And this is very true for not only for actual Pages and Assets but now also in relation to Components which give life to pages and more importantly give life to Customer Experience. Combination of new and old features in AEM enable Authors to leverage and report on everything in AEM as content and make all of their Customer and Author experiences stand out advantage.

Feel free to reach out if you need more information or advice.

Reference Documentation

• Compoent Console - https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/author/page-authoring/default-components.html
• Components for Page Authoring - https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/author/page-authoring/default-components/editmode.html
• AEM 5.6.1 Components - https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/cq/5-6-1/wcm/default_components/components.html
• AEM Capability Matrix - https://drive.google.com/open?id=11sESEtCSf45j5JWknVLE3DJt9NOJaDHfeBBJFOsxt5o
• AEM Reporting 5.6.1 - https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/cq/5-6-1/administering/reporting.html
• AEM Reporting 6.2 - https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/develop/operations/dev-reports.html
• Reporting on Components in AEM on Github -  https://github.com/isobaraustralia/aem-reports-components