Not able to preview DD4T page in SDL Web 8

Question

In our project we are using DD4T Templates in Pages design. In Tridion CME, we are not able to preview the Tridion Pages.

Can any one help me how to preview the DD4T Pages?

Answer 1

By default when you preview a "DD4T Page" in the CME, you will get to see its JSON (or XML in older versions), which can be a useful tool for (Template) developers in case they want to see what exactly is generated by the Template Building Blocks.

It is however also possible to enable a preview which would be useful for editors, which is done by posting the "content" of the Page your DD4T Web application (on your staging site) and using that to generate and return the rendered result.

It was created for DD4T 1.x on .NET only, and I'm not sure if it has been updated/incorporated into DD4T 2.0 or ever made available for DD4T Java. A description of the process can be found in this blog post http://blog.trivident.com/previewing-pages-with-dd4t/, it basically consists of the following four steps:

1. Add a PreviewPage TBB to your Page Templates
2. Create and upload a DD4T.config file with the StagingUrl in there
3. Add a preview route to your web application
4. Fix paths to your referenced stylesheets etc.