How to detect Experience Manager being active?

Question

I know that in Tridion 2013 there is a flag in the ambient data framework which informs the website application whenever session preview is requested. However, i would also like to know when the experience manager itself is open and the site runs in its iframe inside. I have considered doing some javascript coding (detect the iframe in javascript and act accordingly) but i would much rather do this server-side. I do know that, when an editor opens up the experience manager, the page is reloaded.

Anyone have any ideas, or know any headers being set when the experience manager is active?

Regards,

Rogier

Answer 1

Try this in javascript.

if (typeof $display === "object" && $display.getView().getId() === "EditorView") {
    //Experience Manager is enabled
}

Try this in C#, this also works in Tridion 2011.

string sessionPreviewToken = "taf:claim:contentdelivery:webservice:preview:sessionid";

ClaimStore claimStore = AmbientDataContext.CurrentClaimStore;

Dictionary<Uri, object> claims = (Dictionary<Uri, object>)claimStore.GetAll();
Uri sessionTokenUri = new Uri(sessionPreviewToken);

if (claims.ContainsKey(sessionTokenUri)) {
    // Experience Manager is enabled with session preview.
}

Answer 2

I'm unaware of any headers being sent, apart from the referer of course, on opening Experience Manager, the following URL is opened http://your.cms.url/WebUI/Editors/SiteEdit/Views/Editor.aspx#url=http%3A%2F%2Fyour.staging.url%2Fpath%2Fpage.html

The referer of your request on the Staging website is then set to http://your.cms.url/WebUI/Editors/SiteEdit/Views/Editor.aspx

But when the Page is reloaded to update the preview (Session Preview), the referrer will just point to itself again.

What I used myself is a bit of Javascript to detect if the Page is loaded in a frame, assuming it is loaded in the XPM view. It's a bit dodgy (no guarantee against false positives) but the best I could find to easily detect if you were loaded inside XPM.