Experience Preview API

Experience

An experience is a hydrated representation of content authored in Contentful — the visual structure, personalization variants, and content of an experience, ready for a client application to render. The Experience Preview API returns the latest drafts, so unpublished changes are visible.

The XPA returns experiences in two ways:

  • By ID — a straightforward GET request returns the hydrated experience.
  • With personalization input — a POST request lets you send personalization overrides in the request body, which the API applies while hydrating the experience.

Both operations support locale selection, variant targeting, and optimization profiles via query parameters, and require a preview access token.

Getting localized experiences

Locale selection works the same way as on the Experience Delivery API: add a locale query parameter with the locale code to hydrate the experience with content in that locale.

GET https://preview.xdn.contentful.com/spaces/{spaceId}/environments/{envId}/experiences/{expId}?locale=en-US

Because this is the preview host, bound entries and assets don’t need to be published for the requested locale — draft content in that locale is returned, following the same fallback rules configured for the environment’s locales.

Experiences are locale-based-publishing aware and store a localeStatus. Requesting a locale that doesn’t exist for the environment returns a 404, even on preview.