Discontinued content delivery capabilities in the upcoming Tridion Sites 9.6 release

The Tridion Content Delivery platform provides a rich set of APIs and capabilities for interacting with your content. We refine and improve our capabilities in each release, which sometimes means we have to deprecate and subsequently drop these older capabilities. In this post, we describe the upcoming changes to some of these deprecated capabilities.

 We plan to drop the following functionality in Tridion Sites 9.6:

• In-process API
• Legacy transport protocols
• Context Expression module
• Quick installer

Each of these changes is described in the following sections.

Dropping in-process API

The delivery platform has supported the in-process APIs for many years. It allowed customers to run their web applications directly against a content database using Java or .NET libraries. Prior to SDL Web 8, this was the only way to interact with our content query and linking APIs. Since then, the content delivery platform has provided 2 alternative webservice based solutions:

• The OData Content Interaction Services (CIS), which provides drop-in replacement, backward compatible native client libraries – the Content Interaction Library (CIL); and
• The new GraphQL-based public content API

We committed to supporting the in-process APIs, to allow customers time to migrate onto a webservices based architecture, (having deprecated them in SDL Web 8).

The Tridion Sites 9.6 release will no longer include these in-process APIs, allowing us to focus our efforts on enriching our GraphQL API with new capabilities.

What it means for you

• If you are still using these deprecated APIs, we encourage you to switch to the later webservice APIs (ideally the new GraphQL API). You can also still use the CIS/CIL combination (but these were also marked as deprecated in Tridion Sites 9.5).
• You will no longer be able to talk directly to your content datastores from within your web application, instead you should use one of the CIL clients or the GraphQL API.

Going forward, we will expand upon the capabilities of the GraphQL API (which is our API of choice for new projects).

This will help customers decouple their web applications from the storage layer, and allow them to focus on a scalable web-service based solution.

Dropping legacy transport protocols

In Web 8, we deprecated using transport protocols other than HTTP or HTTPS. This capability will be removed altogether in the Tridion Sites 9.6 release.

What it means for you

If you are using legacy publishing across SCP, SFTP or FTP, you will need to reconfigure your deployer and ensure LegacyTransport="false" in your deployer-conf.xml. The ability to configure legacy publishing shall also be removed from the Tridion Sites Content Manager.

Dropping Context Expression module

The Context Expression module was originally built to interact with SDL’s Campaign Management product. This product was divested in 2016, and the Context Expression module was deprecated. It was also exposed as a DXA Module as functionality that could be applied to a Component Presentation. However, with the move towards templateless publishing, similar functionality can be achieved by combining custom metadata on your components and using the Context Service to determine device properties. Experience Optimization can also provide similar capabilities. We will remove this capability from the Tridion Sites 9.6 release.

Dropping Quick installer

The Quick Installer was deprecated in Sites 9.5. This code will be moved into a new, open source project, as it was typically only used for demonstration purposes. The Quick Installer will no longer be supported as part of the core product in Tridion Sites 9.6.