ATG Content Administration and Merchandising include preview features that allow internal users to test content against a sample user profile before deploying it. Preview profiles are stored in a ProfileAdapterRepository component on the management server, and they reference the dps* tables in the versioned database. For a diagram showing the profile repositories used by the ATG platform, see the ATG Business Control Center Administration and Development Guide.
Preview is initiated when an internal user clicks a custom Preview button in the relevant UI. The user selects a preview profile to use, and a page containing the previewed content appears in a separate browser window. (For information on how to add a Preview button and create a Web application containing the preview page or pages, refer to the ATG Business Control Center Administration and Development Guide.)
To allow a user to preview content as another user, the ATG preview code must swap the logged-in user’s profile for the preview profile for the duration of the request. To determine whether swapping should occur for a given Web application, the preview code checks the current request for the value of the atg.preview context parameter. If this parameter is set to false , the profile swap does not occur. Note that the atg.preview parameter is set to false for all ATG’s management applications.
In some cases it is necessary or desirable to force preview swapping in a Web application that otherwise has the feature turned off. For such cases, you can specify a forcePreviewParam query parameter within the preview URL that tells the preview code to ignore the atg.preview setting.
After determining whether preview swapping should occur, the preview code looks for a specific request query parameter that indicates the repository ID of the profile selected for the preview.
Note: In addition to adding a Preview button and creating the pages to use for the preview, you must run the application on the management server with the –layer Preview switch for preview features to be available. See the ATG Business Control Center Administration and Development Guide for more information.
