Tutorial: Adding suggestion groups to the auto-suggest menu

In this tutorial, you customize the auto-suggest menu for your storefront search to display a new navigation suggestion group in the menu. The auto-suggest menu is available in your WebSphere Commerce starter store when you enable WebSphere Commerce search.

When a customer begins typing into your store search field, the auto-suggest menu displays a number of matching suggestions that are divided into suggestion groups. As shown in the following image of the auto-suggest menu, the default suggestion groups include Suggested Keywords, Category, Brand, Articles, and History:

In this tutorial, you add a suggestion group to the auto-suggest menu, which displays suggestions for product warranty types as shown in the following image:

As customers type in the search field, they can use this suggestion group to search for warranty types that match their search entry, for example, Comprehensive or Limited.

In this tutorial, you are adding Java code to:

Implement new search queries that are needed to fetch warranty information from the index.
Populate CatalogNavigationViewType noun parts that are displayed in the user interface.

In addition, you add a search profile to implement the behavior that is needed to support the new suggestion group for warranty data. Finally, you customize the store JSP pages to display the new navigation suggestion group.

Learning objectives

After completing this tutorial, you should be familiar with the following concepts:

WebSphere Commerce search auto-suggest menu.

After completing this tutorial, you should be able to perform the following tasks:

Customize the auto suggest menu to display your own suggestion groups.

Time required

Expect this tutorial to take 2 hours to complete. The tutorial can take longer if you explore the concepts that are related to this tutorial.

Skill level

This tutorial is intended for intermediate WebSphere Commerce developers responsible for creating and customizing WebSphere Commerce search services.

To complete this tutorial, ensure that you are familiar with the following terms and concepts:

WebSphere Commerce search
Web services
XML
WebSphere Commerce services
Relational databases
SQL

System requirements

Before you begin this tutorial, ensure that you complete the following tasks:

Note: Workspaces are not supported when you perform this tutorial.