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User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
Administering
Dynamic caching
In general, caching improves response time and reduces system load. Caching techniques are used to improve the performance of World Wide Web Internet applications. Most techniques cache static content (content that rarely changes) such as graphic and text files. However, many websites serve dynamic content, containing personalized information or data that changes more frequently. Caching dynamic content requires more sophisticated caching techniques, such as those provided by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
Preparing to use caching in WebSphere Commerce
Before you use caching in WebSphere Commerce, ensure that you prepare. If there are major changes to your caching setup, repeat the preparation steps.

User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
- Planning
  Creating a custom implementation of a WebSphere Commerce store requires a significant amount of planning. From gathering client needs, to deploying the live solution, much work is needed to successfully deploy a custom client store. Use the resources in here to help you plan every phase of store creation.
- Installing
  Review the following sections for information about installing the WebSphere Commerce product, associated maintenance, and WebSphere Commerce enhancements.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to WebSphere Commerce Version 8.0, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Deploying
  The topics in this section describe how to publish stores to either a test or production environment, and how to deploy customized code.
- Operating
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using WebSphere Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
  - Overview of administering a WebSphere Commerce site
    In WebSphere Commerce the person who performs administrative tasks is called a Site Administrator. The Site Administrator installs, configures, and maintains WebSphere Commerce and the associated software and hardware. The administrator responds to system warnings, alerts, and errors, and diagnoses and resolves system problems. Typically, this person controls access and authorization (creating and assigning members to the appropriate role), manages the Web site, monitors performance, and manages load balancing tasks. The Site Administrator might be responsible for establishing and maintaining several server configurations for different stages of development such as testing, staging, and production. The Site Administrator also handles critical system backups and resolves performance problems.
  - WebSphere Commerce instance
    Every WebSphere Commerce installation requires at least one instance to function, and each WebSphere Commerce instance can contain one or more stores.
  - Managing features
    You can administer the features for your store and site, such as attribute, catalog, promotion, marketing, order management features, and more. The administration tasks that you can complete differ depending on the type of feature and the tool that you use to administer your store and site.
  - Logging services
    WebSphere Commerce provides facilities for logging. For existing customers, ECTrace and ECMessage are still supported. For new implementations, use the WebSphere Application Server recommendation for logging and tracing.
  - Business auditing
    Business auditing is the capturing of the business logic and objects during a WebSphere Commerce operation. You may want to audit your business for various reasons: generic, such as to review various tasks performed weekly; or specific, such as to track the steps involved in a particular Customer Service Representative's order. A report on business auditing is available in the Administration Console.
  - Business events
    Each time that a command triggers a business event, a record is added to the BUSEVENT database table to persist data from the event. Event listeners and external systems (such as the Marketing component, a back end order management system, or an external analytics system) can use this data to perform further processing.
  - Staging server
    The WebSphere Commerce staging server is a part of the production environment where business and technical users can update and manage store data and preview changes. The changes can then be propagated to the production server.
  - WebSphere Commerce database
    As a site administrator, maintain the WebSphere Commerce database and ensure that any WebSphere Commerce utilities and processes that load and retrieve data from the database is configured to connect to the database properly.
  - Dynamic caching
    In general, caching improves response time and reduces system load. Caching techniques are used to improve the performance of World Wide Web Internet applications. Most techniques cache static content (content that rarely changes) such as graphic and text files. However, many websites serve dynamic content, containing personalized information or data that changes more frequently. Caching dynamic content requires more sophisticated caching techniques, such as those provided by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
    - Preparing to use caching in WebSphere Commerce
      Before you use caching in WebSphere Commerce, ensure that you prepare. If there are major changes to your caching setup, repeat the preparation steps.
      - Caching strategy
        When determining a caching strategy for WebSphere Commerce, there are several key issues to resolve.
      - Environment setup
        To help prepare your environment, see Enabling the dynamic cache service and servlet caching. The cache monitor application, CacheMonitor.ear, must be installed. WebSphere Application Server provides a Dynamic Cache Monitor application to show cache statistics, Edge Side and disk statistics, cache entries, dependency IDs, and cache policy information. To inspect the contents and behavior of the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache, install the WebSphere Application Server Dynamic Cache Monitor.
      - Configuring the dynamic cache service in cachespec.xml
        The dynamic cache service is an in-memory cache system that has disk offload capability. Cacheable objects are defined the cachespec.xml file that is found inside the Web application archive (WAR), Web module WEB-INF directory, or enterprise bean WEB-INF directory. A global cachespec.xml file can also be placed in the application server properties directory, but the recommended method is to place the cache configuration file with the deployment module. There is a sample cache configuration file (cachespec.sample.xml) in the WAS_installdir/properties directory. The cachespec.dtd file is available in the application server properties directory. The following sections detail the steps that are required to configure dynamic caching in the cachespec.xml file.
      - Allowing access to encrypted parameters
        Cache identifiers are based on non confidential information such as store, language, catalog, category, or product identifiers. These identifiers are typically encrypted in the URL. If the parameters are encrypted, a cache miss would result due to missing parameters for the cache ID. Therefore, in order to use these identifiers they must be made visible in the URL first. After these parameters are specified in the WebSphere Commerce configuration file for NonEncryptedParameters then a cache hit would result because they are now visible.
      - Cache identifiers
        When the dynamic cache service places an object in the cache, it labels it with a unique identifying string known as a cache ID. The cache ID is constructed according to<cache-id> rules specified in the <cache-entry> elements. The <cache-id> rules define how to construct cache-ids from information that is associated with an application server request.
      - Custom request attributes for servlet caching
        You can create custom request attributes for servlet caching by adding them to the <map> tag.
      - Production environments
        Operating WebSphere Commerce in a production environment introduces complexities. For example, accessing cache entries that have been offloaded from memory introduces overhead associated with reading from and writing to the disk. Invalidating these entries is time consuming. Therefore, it is important to tune the cache using the available properties. By setting these values to the appropriate values, you improve the cache invalidation process. The second issue is cache replication. When WebSphere Commerce is in a clustered environment, you require a replication environment to share the cache entries between the different nodes in your environment.
    - Administering caching in WebSphere Commerce
      An administrator using caching in WebSphere Commerce should be familiar with full page and fragment caching, Edge Side include, and using the dynamic API not to cache.
    - Cache invalidation
      In order to maintain the relevance of cached data, based on time, user or other variables, the data will have to be invalidated or removed from the cache. Dynacache provides different methods for performing cache invalidation. There are four methods to invalidate the cache.
    - Dynamic caching considerations with JSTL
      WebSphere Commerce uses the Java Server Tag Library (JSTL) to create new JSP pages. If <% out.flush(); %> does not surround the <c:import> tag, using dynacache introduces strange behavior. The out.flush statement is required for all <c:import> statements, not just those for fragments. Even if the page is being cached using full-page caching, the out.flush tags are still required to surround the <c:import> tags.
    - Dynamic caching for persistent session
      Consider an example of dynamic caching for persistent session: The Remember Me feature is enabled, and a guest customer returned to the store. The Remember Me (persistent session) feature in WebSphere Commerce does not require the first request that is processed by the WebSphere Commerce Server to be skipped by the dynamic caching facility and processed during run time. The only caching requirement is that any request that displays user-oriented data must be processed once by the WebSphere Commerce run time before it displays this data. Since pages that contain data that pertains to a particular user are not typically cached, it is acceptable to delay generating the new guest customer until a non-cacheable operation is requested where a new guest customer is created and then migrated.
    - Store relationships for cached store pages
      If your store is using data defined in another store through a store relationship, you must use the request attributes specified by the cache filter to define the relationships. The cache filter is a servlet filter that defines request attributes from the session and store relationship information that can be used by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache. The dynamic cache then uses this information to construct cache IDs and dependency IDs to be used for cache invalidation.
    - Improving marketing performance by using caching
      To improve marketing performance, use runtime caching to eliminate processing to and from the database.
    - Data recording; improving runtime performance
      Two options are provided which can improve runtime performance regarding the recording of user behavior data.
    - Clearing the marketing Web service cache
      You can clear the Web service cache to ensure that the content displayed in an e-Marketing Spot is current and relevant.
    - Setting up command caching for catalog filter
      If your site uses catalog filters, you can set up command caching for catalog filter to help improve site performance.
    - Improving store function performance using caching
      To improve store function performance, use runtime caching to eliminate processing to and from the database.
    - Improving store performance through Commerce Composer JSP caching
      There are two types of JSP components within the Commerce Composer solution. Each can be cached for improved site performance.
    - Improving search engine optimization (SEO) performance using caching
      To improve SEO performance, use runtime caching to eliminate processing to and from the database.
    - Improving price rule performance using caching
      To improve price rule performance, you can tune your business object caching and set up dynamic cache invalidation for prices generated by price rules.
    - WebSphere Commerce data cache
      Enterprise and Professional versions of WebSphere Commerce contain code to use the WebSphere Dynamic Cache facility to perform more caching of database query results. This additional caching code is referred to as the WebSphere Commerce data cache.
    - WebSphere Commerce Search caching
      WebSphere Commerce Search uses fragment caching in the storefront.
  - Extracting, transforming, and loading data
    WebSphere Commerce provides multiple utilities for preparing and loading data into a WebSphere Commerce database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the WebSphere Commerce schema.
  - Payment plug-ins
    To configure a payment plug-in define payment and refund methods; payment and refund rules; and the payment protocols that you intend to use.
  - WebSphere Commerce Search
    For a fully functioning WebSphere Commerce Search implementation, you must understand and complete the search administration tasks, which include search index management and ongoing maintenance.
  - Deploying a WebSphere Commerce dual cell environment
    Consider deploying a dual cell environment to achieve continuous availability and ensure that shoppers are minimally affected by planned or unplanned outages.
  - IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce
    IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce is a separately purchased product that provides a light-weight customer service solution that is embedded in the Aurora B2C and Aurora B2B storefronts. Even though this solution is a separately purchased product, it is not a separate application. Stores that are enabled with IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce allow a customer service representative (CSR) to act on behalf of guest customers and registered customers. A CSR can manage customer accounts, cancel and reorder orders, and shop as customer. A CSR can also act on behalf of Buyer Administrators to help complete Aurora B2B tasks from the storefront, without having to access the Organization Administration Console.
- Tutorials
  WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your WebSphere Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
- Developing
  The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage WebSphere Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of WebSphere Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
- Troubleshooting

Preparing to use caching in WebSphere Commerce

Before you use caching in WebSphere Commerce, ensure that you prepare. If there are major changes to your caching setup, repeat the preparation steps.

Note: In the development environment servlet caching is disabled.

For more information about tuning, see the Tuning guide for dynamic cache and data replication service white paper.