Considerations before you decide to use Content Definition API

With the introduction of Content Definition API, it became possible to keep the definitions of the content structures, entirely in Front End and design a true headless solution with complete separation of the back end and front end. We can manage types via API and create new types as blocks and pages even without a release of the backend and create strongly typed typescript objects depending on the solution. Before you decide whether the use of Content Definition API is the right solution for you or not, you will need to consider the following points.

• Example projects such as https://github.com/episerver/content-delivery-js-sdk rely on a single big manifest.json to define all the types. To achieve strongly typed objects, you will still need extra development efforts, there could be different approaches to achieve this, e.g. https://github.com/episerver/Foundation-spa-react/tree/Cms12/
• If you are writing a solution for DXP and considering Content Definition API just for the sake of achieving strongly typed objects, then an alternative approach could be to use Content Graph https://world.optimizely.com/blogs/Jonas-Bergqvist/Dates/2022/9/strongly-typed-cms-content-with-typescript--react3/
• Types generated via Content Definition API are of Types from DB, the feature available for CMS Editor for Types from code will not be available.
• There is no replacement available for some .Net attributes such as AllowedTypes (e.g. to restrict ContentArea for specific blocks)
• All settings available in the admin UI are not available through the API yet. For example, you cannot manage websites, languages, or translations.
• Since changes could be made to the same content types but from different sources, there may be conflicts that could affect existing content. To reduce the risk of conflicts, you should add version information to the content types. To deal with the conflicts, follow semantic versioning https://docs.developers.optimizely.com/content-cloud/v1.7.0-content-definitions-api/docs/semantic-versioning
• The Language Branch API is available only in version 3.4.0 or later of the Content Definitions API.