The Experience Edge Connector
You use the Experience Edge Connector module to publish JSS sites and content from Sitecore CM (content management) to the highly scalable Sitecore Experience Edge delivery platform.
Using the Experience Edge Connector module, you can:
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Create a specific publishing target for Experience Edge publishing.
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Use the same publishing user experience in the Content Editor.
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Publish items and sites using smart publish, incremental publish, and republish.
The fundamental concept of the connector module is that it delivers static content in real-time.
The connector module does not rely on the web database to decide what item to publish to the edge. It has defined its own publishing pipeline edgePublishItem that compares the items between the Master database and the edge. A critical difference from regular publishing is that the content is published in a static format to the Experience Edge delivery platform. Publishing in a static format flattens all dynamic content structures in Sitecore (standard values, language fallbacks, rendering data source(s), template inheritance, and so on) at publishing time. The following diagram explains the process:
Flattening dynamic content structures means that when value-provider items (standard value items and content used as rendering data sources) are published, all content that depends on them is published automatically. Therefore, publishing a single item can lead to publishing hundreds of items. For example, if you publish a template item, all items based on that template directly or indirectly (through template inheritance) are also published. Another example is that when you publish a content item used as a rendering data source by some page, that page is also published.
The connector implements its logic to identify the related items to publish.