Sitecore XM Cloud preview publishing target

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 When I was working on a customer demo recently that involved XM Cloud, I noticed few things when setting up a preview publishing target. If you are new to preview publishing target, I recommend reading this page https://doc.sitecore.com/xmc/en/users/xm-cloud/setting-up-a-preview-publishing-target.html. 

As you may have noticed, preview publishing target is different from GraphQL preview endpoint. The latter is available with every XM Cloud instance but publishes all content in the master database irrespective of the workflow state that the content is in whereas the former only publishes content that is in a specific workflow state.

The business use case is to have and showcase a preview environment that is as close to production in terms of content and code so preview GraphQL endpoint did not meet our needs. While setting up preview publishing target, I noticed couple of things:

  1. Preview publishing points to a SQL database and not to an Experience Edge - Currently XM Cloud supports only 1 Experience edge endpoint against a XM Cloud environment.
  2. Preview site pulls data from a Sitecore SQL database whereas production pulls data from experience edge. Preview looks more like a traditional CMS way of content delivery and not the modern headless content delivery.
I raised a Sitecore support ticket (CS0439045) to request a secondary Experience Edge to support preview publishing and it was registered as a feature request (CPL-35435).

If you run into similar issues with preview publishing targets, you know why, and that the remediation is already registered as a request with Sitecore.

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