When you are an AEM backend developer, the pattern is very familiar: Whenever you need to provide configuration data to the service, you collect this data in the activate() method (by good tradition that’s the name of the method annotated with the “ @Activate ” annotation). I use this pattern often and normally it does not cause any problems.

But recently in my current project we ran into an issue which caused headaches. We needed to provide an API Key which is supposed to change every now and then, and therefor is not configured by an OSGI property, but instead stored inside the repository, so it can be authored.

We deployed the code, entered the API key, and … Guess what? It was not working at all. The API key was read in the Activate method, but at the time the key was not yet present. And the only chance to make it work was to restart the service/bundle/instance. And besides the initial provisioning it would have required a restart every time the key has been changed.

That’s not a nice situation when you try to automate your deployment (or not to break your automated deployment). We had to rewrite our logic in a way, that the API key was read periodically (every minute) from the repository. Of course the optimal way would have been to use JCR observation or an Sling Event Handler to detect any changes on the API Key Node/Resource immediately …

So whenever you have such “dynamic” configuration data, you should design your code in a way, that it can cope with situations that this configuration is not there (yet) or changes. The least thing you want to do is to restart your instance(s) because such a configuration change has happened.

Let’s formulate this as an pattern: Do not read from the repository in the “activate” method of a service! The content you read might change during runtime, and you need to react on it.