Offline Content Card Availability

This tutorial explains how to enable offline availability for Content Cards, allowing them to display when your app launches without a network connection.

Overview

When offline availability is enabled, Content Cards fetched from Adobe Journey Optimizer are persisted to the device. On the next app launch, the SDK loads them from disk before any network response arrives, so users see content immediately regardless of connectivity.

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Pre-requisites

1. Integrate and register AEPMessaging extension in your app.
2. Ensure you are using AEPMessaging version 3.12.0 or later and AEPCore version 3.x.x or later.

Step 1: Enable offline availability in Tags

1. Sign in to Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection and open Tags.
2. Select your mobile property and open the Adobe Journey Optimizer extension configuration.
3. Enable the Content Card Offline Availability setting.
4. Save and publish your Tags configuration.

Once enabled, Content Cards returned by any successful updatePropositionsForSurfaces call are automatically written to a disk cache.

Step 2: Fetch Content Cards as usual

No code changes are required to enable persistence. Continue calling updatePropositionsForSurfaces as you normally would. When the device is online and the call succeeds, the SDK automatically writes the returned cards to disk.

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val homePageSurface = Surface("homepage")
Messaging.updatePropositionsForSurfaces(listOf(homePageSurface))

final Surface homePageSurface = new Surface("homepage");
Messaging.updatePropositionsForSurfaces(Collections.singletonList(homePageSurface));

Step 3: Retrieve Content Cards — with or without a network call

This is where offline availability is leveraged. You can collect getContentCardUIFlow without calling updatePropositionsForSurfaces first in the current session. If a prior session successfully fetched cards for the surface and the offline feature was enabled, the SDK loads those cards from the disk cache and emits them immediately — even with no network connection.

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class AepContentCardViewModel(
    private val contentCardUIProvider: ContentCardUIProvider
) : ViewModel() {

    private val _aepUIList = MutableStateFlow<List<AepUI<*, *>>>(emptyList())
    val aepUIList: StateFlow<List<AepUI<*, *>>> = _aepUIList.asStateFlow()

    // Cards are served from the disk cache if a prior session fetched them successfully —
    // no updatePropositionsForSurfaces call is needed in the current session
    val contentCardFlow = contentCardUIProvider.getContentCardUIFlow()

    init {
        viewModelScope.launch {
            contentCardFlow.collect { result ->
                result.onSuccess { aepUI -> _aepUIList.value = aepUI }
                result.onFailure { /* handle error */ }
            }
        }
    }
}

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Step 4: Clear the cache when needed

Use clearCachedPropositions to remove all persisted Content Cards and the in-memory cache. This is useful, for example, when a user logs out.

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Messaging.clearCachedPropositions()

Messaging.clearCachedPropositions();

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How it works

Tracking and analytics

The SDK sends a decisioning.propositionDisplay event to Adobe Experience Platform when a Content Card is displayed. Each card item in that event includes a servedFromPersistentCache flag under items[].data.characteristics:

You can use this flag in downstream reporting — for example in Customer Journey Analytics or by querying your Experience Event dataset — to distinguish network-served impressions from cache-served impressions.

The following example shows the relevant portion of a display event as captured in Assurance:

{
  "xdm": {
    "eventType": "decisioning.propositionDisplay",
    "_experience": {
      "decisioning": {
        "propositionEventType": { "display": 1 },
        "propositions": [
          {
            "id": "c1984e87-6c5e-4441-8691-f148af4975d8",
            "scope": "mobileapp://com.example.app/homepage",
            "items": [
              {
                "id": "cd20a906-f444-45fe-bdd8-868acc8a00b0",
                "data": {
                  "characteristics": {
                    "servedFromPersistentCache": true
                  }
                }
              }
            ]
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

What is and is not persisted