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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
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.
Data Load utility
The Data Load utility is an enhanced business object based loading utility. This utility provides an efficient solution for loading information into your WebSphere Commerce database. You can also customize the Data Load utility to load other types of data. The Data Load utility is the recommended loading utility.
Data Load input file format
To run the Data Load utility, an input file is required. The input file must be a CSV or XML file. Your input file must follow a particular format for the Data Load to be able to load your file.
Data Load utility CSV column and XML element definitions
Look up the database column name and definitions for business objects to find details about the required and optional fields, and the values that they can contain.
Promotion objects
To load promotion objects with the Data Load utility, you must understand the information that you include in an input file to load the data. You must also understand how to complete the columns or elements in each of the input files that you are loading.

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.
  - 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.
    - Data Load utility
      The Data Load utility is an enhanced business object based loading utility. This utility provides an efficient solution for loading information into your WebSphere Commerce database. You can also customize the Data Load utility to load other types of data. The Data Load utility is the recommended loading utility.
      - Data Load input file format
        To run the Data Load utility, an input file is required. The input file must be a CSV or XML file. Your input file must follow a particular format for the Data Load to be able to load your file.
        Creating data in CSV format
        You can create data for loading into your database with the Data Load utility in a CSV formatted file. The easiest way to create this data is to download a sample CSV file to use as a starting point.
        Creating data in XML format
        You can create data that you want to load into your database with the Data Load utility in an XML formatted file. This XML file must follow a specific XML format, which is similar in structure and content to the supported CSV format for loading catalog data.
        Data Load utility CSV column and XML element definitions
        Look up the database column name and definitions for business objects to find details about the required and optional fields, and the values that they can contain.
        Catalog object input file definitions
        Look up the column and element name definitions for catalog object types to find details about the required and optional fields.
        Catalog filter object input file definitions
        Look up the column and element name definitions for catalog filter object types to find details about the required and optional fields.
        Price objects
        To load price objects with the Data Load utility, you must understand the information that you include in an input file to load the data. You must also understand how to complete the required and optional columns or elements in each of the input files that you load.
        Commerce Composer objects
        To load Commerce Composer objects with the Data Load utility, you must understand each of the input files that you can use to load the data. You must also understand how to fill the columns or elements in the input files with the correct data.
        Promotion objects
        To load promotion objects with the Data Load utility, you must understand the information that you include in an input file to load the data. You must also understand how to complete the columns or elements in each of the input files that you are loading.
        Promotions
        You can use an XML input file to create or change promotions for a store. When you are creating an input file to load promotion data, you can include various XML elements and values in your file. The XML elements that you must include in your input file depend on the properties, description, purchase conditions, rewards, and redemption methods for the promotions that you are loading.
        Promotion folders
        To create promotion folders or a promotion folder hierarchy for a store, load data from a CSV or XML input file into the WebSphere Commerce database. By loading the information to create promotion folders, you can provide business users with more folders in the Promotions tool to help organize promotions in the tool.
        Promotion folder relationship
        To create relationships between promotions and promotion folders, load data from a CSV or XML input file into the WebSphere Commerce database. By loading the relationship information, you sort the promotions for a store into folders to make locating promotions easier for business users in the Promotions tool.
        Marketing objects
        To load marketing objects with the Data Load utility, you must understand the information that you include in an input file to load the data. You must also understand how to complete the columns or elements in each of the input files that you are loading.
      - Business object mediators
        The data load business object mediator converts the business objects into physical objects. Two types of mediators that are provided with the Data Load utility are the component-based mediator and the table-based mediator. Several component-based mediators are available for catalog, inventory, and price components.
      - Data Load utility table-based mediator and builder
        Use the table object builder and table object mediator to load data directly into a table with the Data Load utility when a component-based business object mediator does not exist. You can use the TableObjectMediator and TableObjectBuilder to load your custom data directly into your target database tables. This mediator and builder can ensure that the data is loaded into the correct table and columns. You do not have to create a custom business object mediator and builder or extend an existing mediator or builder.
      - Data Load file difference preprocessing
        You can run a file difference preprocess for routine data loads to improve the Data Load utility performance for loading these files. Running a file difference can reduce the loading time that is required to load your routine updates to your WebSphere Commerce database, reduce server usage time, and improve server performance.
      - Data Load utility best practices
        When you use the Data Load utility, there are some general configuration recommendations to ensure that you take advantage of the full capability of data load. If you are loading catalog, price, member, or inventory-related data with the Data Load utility, review the component-related best practices.
      - Configuring and running the Data Load utility
        To configure and run the Data Load utility, create a file to load, define the data reader, load order, and environment configuration files. Then, enter the data load shell script command with modifying parameters from a command-line interface.
      - Scenarios: Data Load utility
        By reviewing different scenarios for using the Data Load utility, you can learn more about how you can use the utility.
      - Samples: Data Load utility
        The samples that are provided with the Data Load utility demonstrate best-practice methods for loading data using common loading scenarios. Use the samples as a template for loading your own data to your store.
      - Initializing the attribute dictionary
        If your store does not have an attribute dictionary, set the initAttributeDictionary property to initialize the attribute dictionary and then use the data load utility to create the attribute dictionary in Management Center.
      - Substituting data load attribute values with variables
        You can substitute the values of most attributes in the wc-dataload.xml data load order configuration file and wc-dataload-env.xml data load environment configuration files. By using variable substitutions, you can change the value of attributes without editing the configuration file. For example, you can substitute the value of the user ID attribute for a variable.
      - Loading data into workspaces using the Data Load utility
        The Data Load utility supports loading data into a workspace. By loading data into a workspace you can make and preview changes to managed assets, without affecting what is running on your site.
      - Loading values for single and multiple value attributes
        You can configure the loading process for Catalog Upload and the Data Load utility to load data separately for both single and multiple value descriptive attributes. By separating these load processes, you can ensure that the values for your single value and multiple value attributes are updated accurately.
      - Reuse attribute assigned values with the Data Load utility
        You can use the Data Load utility to reuse assigned values for attributes when the same value is needed for multiple catalog entries. By reusing attribute assigned values across catalog entries, you can reduce the number of duplicate values that are created in the database.
      - Loading customer segment members by email address
        You can create a customer segment that business users can manage in the Marketing tool by loading a list of email addresses.
      - Loading member group members by email address
        You can load members into member groups by resolving the unique ID for a member with only the member email address. By resolving the unique ID with the email address, you do not need to include the member logon ID or distinguished name in your input file.
      - Loading promotions with the Data Load utility
        You can configure the Data Load utility to load promotion data in an XML input file to create or change promotions in a store. By using the Data Load utility to load promotions, you can quickly create or change multiple promotions in a single operation.
      - Loading marketing objects with the Data Load utility
        You can configure the Data Load utility to load marketing data to create customer segments, e-Marketing Spots, activities, marketing content, and any associated assets. By using the Data Load utility to load this data, you can quickly create multiple marketing objects and types of objects in a single operation.
      - Configuring a Data Load utility scheduler job
        You can use the WebSphere Commerce Administration Console to schedule a Data Load utility job for your site. By using a scheduler job, you can configure the Data Load utility to routinely load an input file, such as for loading frequently updated data.
    - Data Extract utility
      The Data Extract utility is a command-line utility that you can use to extract data from the WebSphere Commerce database into an output file.
    - Catalog Upload feature
      You can configure the Catalog Upload feature in Management Center to change the behavior for how the Catalog Upload feature loads data. You can configure properties for the utility to change validation behavior, invalidate the cache, load SEO information, and more.
    - Mass load utilities
      The mass load utilities provide an efficient way to load large amount of data. The Data Load utility, which is an enhanced business object based loading utility, is the recommended loading utility.
  - 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

Promotion object input file definitions

To load promotion objects with the Data Load utility, you must understand the information that you include in an input file to load the data. You must also understand how to complete the columns or elements in each of the input files that you are loading.

For samples that demonstrate how to use these input files in various scenarios, see Promotion samples.