Tutorial: Creating folders in the Marketing tool

In this tutorial, you learn how to add support for folders in the Marketing tool. The marketing folders that you create in this tutorial are specific for grouping e-Marketing Spots to improve organizing and managing these e-Marketing Spots.

Attention: This tutorial is based on the folder support that is included in Feature Pack 5 and is not recommended if you are on a newer feature pack level. Beginning with Feature Pack 6, support is provided by default for grouping e-Marketing Spots, activities, customer segments, marketing content, promotions, and attribute dictionary attributes. This support includes the capability of creating, changing, and deleting folders within the Management Center Catalogs, Marketing, and Promotions tools. You are not able to group folders created by following this tutorial with folders that are created by using Management Center. If you create Management Center folders by following the steps included in this tutorial, delete those folders before you create folders by using Management Center. For more information about folders, see Folders.

Feature Pack 7 or later Support is provided by default for grouping content pages and layouts in the Commerce Composer tool. This support includes creating, changing, and deleting folders with the Commerce Composer tool.

To create your e-Marketing Spot folders, you extend the Marketing tool to include folder support for e-Marketing Spots. With the folder support enabled, a Marketing Manager can group e-Marketing Spots to categorize and manage the e-Marketing Spots within the Marketing tool.

Note: This tutorial uses the Derby database as an example database. This tutorial focuses on the technique flow for how to customize folders in an asset store, such as the Aurora starter store.

Learning objectives

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

Management Center object definitions
Top and primary object definitions
Child and reference objects
List view and properties view
Management Center tool definitions
JSP files

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

Create folders in the marketing tool
Create Management Center primary and child objects definitions, and reference objects
Create Management Center view definitions, such as properties views and list views
Create Struts actions to register the new JSP files
Create JSP files to display both the folders and e-Marketing Spots in folders
Implement access control

Time required

Expect this tutorial to take 1.5 to 2 hours to complete. The tutorial takes longer if you explore concepts that are related to this tutorial.

Skill level

This tutorial is intended for advanced WebSphere Commerce developers responsible for customizing Marketing features. To complete this tutorial, ensure that you are familiar with customizing Management Center, and the following terms and concepts:

Management Center framework
e-Marketing Spot & Marketing tool
Web services
OpenLaszlo Language
Nouns
SQL
XML
XPath
Access control
Resource bundles and properties files
Rational Application Developer
JSP and Serialization JSP files

System requirements

Installed WebSphere Commerce Developer Version 7
Installed WebSphere Commerce Developer Feature Pack 5

Prerequisites

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

Create a Marketing Manager user with the Organization Administration Console. Use the following properties when you create this user:
Properties that are required for creating a Marketing Manager

User ID Organization Roles

Market Mgr Root Organization Marketing Manager

For information about creating a user, follow the steps in the following topic: Creating a user

Properties that are required for creating a Marketing Manager
User ID	Organization	Roles
Market Mgr	Root Organization	Marketing Manager

Tutorial resources

You can download and review a compressed file that contains the code samples that are used in this tutorial. Download and extract this file to a temporary directory, such as C:\Temp:

CreateFolders.zip