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How To Preview Pages With MX

There are a few ways to preview and test your pages.

1. If your pages/templates/resolvers are published but you haven’t updated MX Service to route traffic

Common scenario is when you’re testing your pages before pushing live traffic. This means you are testing via non-CDN site, Under myorg.arcpublishing.com. Since this domain is also used for Arc Admin tools, PageBuilder preview urls are prefixed with /pf/ then your page URIs. Generally you provide Arc-Site id as _website query string parameter.

Example: https://myorg.arcpublishing.com/pf/sports/?_website=the-gazette

1.1. You can manually add mxId to these URLs to ask specific MX if it understands and renders that URI.

Example:

  1. https://myorg.arcpublishing.com/pf/sports/?_website=the-gazette this URL will render this URI with default MX

  2. https://myorg.arcpublishing.com/pf/sports/?_website=the-gazette&mxId=e635a6c0 this URL will render this URI with the specific MX

This method is useful to test same URI with different MX if you’re switching a page’s traffic from an MX to another. You will be able to see if both of your bundles and PageBuilder data (page/template/resolvers) are configured correctly and rendering pages identically.

1.2. Without manually constructing the URLs, you can use PageBuilder Editor’s, preview links. These links will construct the internal preview URLs with including mxId in them for you. Therefore, they will always render the preview, even if you haven’t set up your routes by setting siteMappings in MX-service for that MX. This is a consistent and reliable way to test your pages.

First go to the MX you want to test pages. In list of pages screen, click the site name you want to preview that page with:

Preview MX Pages in Editor

In Curation interface, by selecting the site to preview, then clicking “eye” icon:

Preview MX Pages in Editor

2. If your pages/templates/resolvers published and MX Service is updated

This means you’re fully published and routing live traffic. But the common scenario to do this is in non-prod environments, so you can test end-to-end.

This approach will get you closest to your final reader-facing experience. Where there is no mxId or _website in the URLs and everything in the pages works in its final state: resource paths have everything it needs so it renders the page correctly, and the links in the page smoothly navigates pages, regardless of how many MX powers your site.

For this testing, you need to use the CDN-ready url of your domain. This can be a custom domain your team set up for your test environments like https://dev.mysite.com or you can use Arc-provided CDN url for your organization/environment/site.

You can see this in Delivery > Sites tile, with clicking to the site you want to test and use the CDN url for that site, wether using “default domain name” or the one of the domains in the “Domains” tab if you have domains configured for this site:

Site CDN URL for MX Preview

When detecting an issue, you can use How to identify which MX renders a page how to guide to determine which MX was rendering that URL.