Troubleshooting: Storefront categories do not display after you publish a store archive

After successfully publishing a store archive, the category navigation menu is not displayed in your storefront. For example, in the Aurora starter store, the Department menu does not display any categories.

Problem

This issue occurs because the search index failed to create. The reason for the failure is that Solr builds the content index for the EAR resource but the WebSphere Commerce Server did not copy the content to the EAR resource.

Typically, this problem occurs only in a server environment because setting up and building the search index is a manual step. For a development environment, the search index is automatically set up and built when you publish a store archive.

Solution

You must complete the following tasks to have your top categories display in your store:

  1. Set up the search index
  2. Preprocess the search index data.
  3. Build the WebSphere Commerce search index.