About this service
The Component Service is a new capability of the Squiz Developer Experience Platform (DXP) to make it much easier for developers to build and update digital experiences.
Developers can build simple design system components that display basic structured content through to complex interactive and data-driven elements. Developers build using industry standards like JavaScript, JSON Schema, and a fast local development environment. Components can be deployed for content editors to use within the Squiz Content Management Service or deployed to other websites or channels.
The Component Service is deliberately flexible to suit the developer’s needs. Bring your own source control, development tools, and CI/CD process - or keep it simple and deploy manually.
Editing experiences for content editors are automatically generated from your content model, allowing a consistent editing experience even for complex structured content.
Designers, web managers, and other business stakeholders can browse and preview your component sets in the DXP, making it much easier for developers to collaborate and get a fast feedback loop with the business. The Component Service is designed to allow your organization to manage a design system across many websites with hundreds of editors and stakeholders.
Component disambiguation
The term component can be confusing as it is used in many different contexts, especially on the web.
For this documentation, component will refer to an independent part of a website delivered by the Component Service.
The Squiz DXP Component Service runs your component code and delivers the components at render time. When you have created and deployed a component, it is available on the All Components page in the DXP Console, and can be organized into component sets.
What is a component?
From a developer’s point of view, the component is a set of files that is used to deliver the component.
The set of files is:
-
A
manifest.jsonthat defines the component and its content model -
A JavaScript file for rendering the component in a node run time
-
Static files required by the component
-
Preview files for testing your component locally or displaying it to stakeholders in the DXP Console.
From a content editor’s point of view, the component appears as an option they can choose in Squiz Content Management Service to add a section to their page.
From an end user’s point of view, the component is a section of a web page they read or interact with.
Read File structure to understand the different files and directories that comprise a component.
What is the CLI?
The DXP CLI tool provides the commands necessary to interact with various Squiz DXP services, including the Component Service. For this documentation, unless expressly stated otherwised, references to the CLI will be referring to the DXP CLI.
Full documentation about the DXP CLI, including which services and commands are available, can be found on help.squiz.net