Planning the user interface customization

In this lesson, you plan which parts of the Management Center user interface you need to customize to support your new promotion type.

About this task

You must add support for your new promotion type in the Promotions tool so that business users can use it to create promotions. The input widgets you need to collect information from business users have already been defined for use in the existing promotion types. When creating a new promotion type, you must specify which of these widgets you need, and then arrange and customize them as required to support your promotion type. It is best to do some planning so you know precisely what you need to customize. A good place to start is with a similar, existing promotion type.

Procedure

  1. Find an existing promotion type with a similar purchase and reward condition that you can use as a base for your new promotion type.

    In this tutorial, you are basing your new promotion type on the existing promotion type titled "Buy catalog entry X, get catalog entry Y free," but you are changing the purchase condition and reward details. For this existing promotion type, the user interface for the Purchase Condition and Reward section looks like this:



  2. Identify which user interface elements you need to modify or add in order to support your new promotion.

    For your new promotion type, "Spend $ on catalog entry X, get catalog entry Y free," you can reuse most of the widgets and labels from the existing promotion in the previous screen capture; however you will need to make some changes so that your Purchase Condition and Reward section looks like this:



    Note: You will not reuse the widget for "Minimum purchase (quantity)." You will add a new widget for 'Minimum Purchase on base catalog entries ($)."
    In addition, to allow business users to choose your new promotion type, you can:
    1. Place the new promotion type in the existing Free gift promotions template folder.
    2. Add its name to the Promotion Type Selector window.
    3. Add a description and example to help business users identify the promotion type.


Results

In this lesson, you planned the user interface you need to collect information from business users for your promotion type. In the next lesson, you begin implementing these changes by defining the resource bundles for the custom text strings you need.