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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.
Developing
The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.
WebSphere Commerce Search
WebSphere Commerce comes with a powerful and fully integrated search function. The search functions in WebSphere Commerce provide an enriched customer experience, with features such as automatic search term suggestions and spelling correction. Since it is built on open standards, WebSphere Commerce Search is highly flexible and extensible. Starter stores can use the search engine's most sophisticated features without requiring extra customization. A key feature of Search is that sales personnel can create and manage search term associations, and search-based merchandising rules, from within the Management Center and Store view.
Extension points and customization tasks
WebSphere Commerce Search contains extension points that can be used for customization. There are mandatory and optional areas to work with, depending on the customization to your WebSphere Commerce Search implementation.

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
- 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.
  - Functional architecture
    Functional architecture provides both the set of patterns used to implement the business functionality and the frameworks in which these business functions execute.
  - Persistent object model
    WebSphere Commerce deals with a large amount of persistent data. There are numerous tables defined in the current database schema. Even with this extensive schema, however, you might need to extend or customize the database schema for your particular business needs.
  - Presentation layer
    WebSphere Commerce uses Java Server Pages (JSP) to implement the view layer of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. The view layer is in charge of retrieving data from the database through the use of data beans and formatting it to meet the display requirements. The view layers determines whether the request is sent to a browser or streamed out as XML. JSP files present a clean separation between data content and presentation.
  - Controller layer
    The Controller layer is the conductor of operations for a request. It controls the transaction scope and manages the session related information for the request. The controller first dispatches to a command and then calls the appropriate view processing logic to render the response.
  - Business logic layer
    The business logic layer is the business components that provide OAGIS services to return data or start business processes. The presentation layer uses these OAGIS services to display data, or to invoke a business process. The business logic provides data required by the presentation layer. The business logic layer exists because more than just fetching and updating data is required by an application; there is also additional business logic independent of the presentation layer.
  - Persistence layer
    The interaction between the business objects and persistence layer is isolated in an object called the Business Object Mediator. Business object document (BOD) commands interact with the Business Object Mediator to handle the interaction with the logical objects and how they are persisted.
  - Business model information model
    A business model, a representation of the business processes used throughout the site, provides a sample commerce solution which includes an organization structure, default user roles and access control policies, one or more starter stores, administration tools, and business processes that demonstrate best practices. A business model can be customized to support business requirements and scenarios. WebSphere Commerce provides sample business models that show some common commerce solutions. These business models are created by setting up an organization hierarchy structure, access control policies, stores, and contracts that help satisfy the necessary business requirements.
  - Business models
    Before starting to develop your site with WebSphere Commerce, you need to determine the business model supported by WebSphere Commerce that best represents the purpose of your site. Usually sites created with WebSphere Commerce will be implemented based on of one of these business models.
  - Store data information model
    Store data is the information that is loaded into the WebSphere Commerce Server database, which allows your store to function. The URL Registry Entries and View Registry Entries packages are included in the diagram, but they are not database assets. These entries are presentation configuration (that is, struts actions and forwards) that must be deployed. URL registry entries are shown in the diagram to illustrate the entire store data information model. To operate properly, a store must have the data in place to support all customer activities. For example, in order for a customer to make a purchase, your store must contain a catalog of goods for sale (catalog data), the data associated with processing orders (tax and shipping data), and the inventory to fulfill the request (inventory and fulfillment data).
  - Customizing WebSphere Commerce
    You can extend the WebSphere Commerce product to fit your business needs. This topic describes the prerequisite skills and required knowledge that you need to customize business logic. After you have the required knowledge, use WebSphere Commerce Developer to take tutorials that guide you step-by-step through various customization scenarios.
  - WebSphere Commerce development environment
    WebSphere Commerce Developer is the development toolkit for customizing a WebSphere Commerce application.
  - Web services and WebSphere Commerce
    A web service is an interface that describes a collection of operations that are accessible through the network by using standardized XML messaging.
  - WebSphere Commerce Search
    WebSphere Commerce comes with a powerful and fully integrated search function. The search functions in WebSphere Commerce provide an enriched customer experience, with features such as automatic search term suggestions and spelling correction. Since it is built on open standards, WebSphere Commerce Search is highly flexible and extensible. Starter stores can use the search engine's most sophisticated features without requiring extra customization. A key feature of Search is that sales personnel can create and manage search term associations, and search-based merchandising rules, from within the Management Center and Store view.
    - Search terminology
      WebSphere Commerce Search uses a number of specialized terms. A concise list of the most commonly used terms is provided to get you started.
    - Search services and interactions
      WebSphere Commerce Search includes several key services and interaction areas, including the search interface, programming model, and its interactions with other WebSphere Commerce components.
    - Search index
      The WebSphere Commerce Search index is built from temporary tables that read from a search index schema, and build structured and unstructured site content.
    - Deployment topologies and scenarios
      WebSphere Commerce Search indexes are created separately based on a specific master catalog. After you deploy the WebSphere Commerce Search index, you can separately manage and rebuild each index to refresh its data.
    - Search relevancy and merchandising
      Search relevancy and merchandising is the process of controlling the search results that are returned to shoppers in the storefront, and the order in which they appear. There are several techniques that can be used to influence search relevancy, which lets you return products in the order that best suits your business needs.
    - Search configuration
      WebSphere Commerce Search is configured using several files. These files contains properties that control certain search features, and can be extended to meet your business requirements.
    - Extension points and customization tasks
      WebSphere Commerce Search contains extension points that can be used for customization. There are mandatory and optional areas to work with, depending on the customization to your WebSphere Commerce Search implementation.
      - Search index schema customization file x-schema.xml
        Adding new fields into the index schema requires modifying the x-schema.xml file to add the new index field. Typically, an existing index is updated to add new fields (local index). In other instances, it is recommended to extend the product index by creating an index as an extension of an existing index (extension index).
      - Extending the base index schema
        The base index schema can be extended to suit your business needs. For example, to separate data into different indexes that are based on their refresh intervals.
      - Customizing indexing
        The indexing process requires mapping data from an external source (database or file) to index fields to create index records or index documents. Depending on the complexity of the source data and index schema design, preprocessing the data might be required. Otherwise, indexing can be directly performed by using either the Data Import Handler (DIH) to index data from the database, or Solr APIs to index data from a file.
      - Customizing the search run time
        You can customize several areas of the search run time.
      - Adding custom index fields in REST responses
        You can add custom index fields to be returned in REST responses by updating the wc-component.xml file.
      - Customizing search profiles
        WebSphere Commerce Search uses search profiles to control the storefront search experience at a page-level. Search profiles group search runtime parameters (search index name, search index fields, expression providers and result filters, paging and sorting), and search feature configurations (text highlight, facets, and spelling correction). Search profiles are defined in the WebSphere Commerce Search configuration file, wc-search.xml.
      - Customizing WebSphere Commerce Search in the Management Center
        You must customize WebSphere Commerce Search when you are adding new indexed catalog entry properties to search rule actions or targets.
      - Customizing WebSphere Commerce Search in the storefront
        You can customize WebSphere Commerce Search in the storefront to suit your business needs. You can customize WebSphere Commerce Search according to your role within the WebSphere Commerce site.
      - Category navigation rules
        You can use navigation rules to sort products in a category via a specific criterion such as price.
      - Customizable components of the final Solr query
        You can customize components of the final Solr query by using query parsers. A query parser is a component responsible for parsing the textual query and converting it into corresponding Lucene Query objects.
      - Search term association handling
        Search term associations are used to suggest more, different, or replacement products in search results. Search term associations can also link search terms to a selected landing page in the store. Business users create and manage search term associations in the Management Center by using the Catalogs tool.
      - Integrating WebSphere Commerce with third-party search engines
        Integrating WebSphere Commerce Search with third-party search engines other than Apache Solr can be accomplished by modifying default interfaces and performing other customizations to meet your business requirements. However, it is important to note that this process is an advanced task, as WebSphere Commerce Search is a core runtime component in WebSphere Commerce. Many features are tightly integrated with the search component. Therefore, replacing WebSphere Commerce Search with a third-party search engine is an in-depth customization.
      - Limitations of WebSphere Commerce Search
        The following limitations exist in WebSphere Commerce Search.
- 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

WebSphere Commerce Search extension points and customization tasks

WebSphere Commerce Search contains extension points that can be used for customization. There are mandatory and optional areas to work with, depending on the customization to your WebSphere Commerce Search implementation.

Most customization flows involve indexing new data from either the database or a file, searching against the new indexed fields, displaying the indexed data in the storefront, and creating business rules by using the indexed data field. Other advanced search customization areas require some runtime customization where a custom search expression provider, search result filter, or other runtime search extension points might require customization.

These extension points are described in the following flow diagram:
WebSphere Commerce Search architecture

WebSphere Commerce Search architecture

Where the WebSphere Commerce Search run time is used on the search server. Instead of using BOD and performing object based-mediation, the search REST programming model does not rely on any SDO. It uses POJO and raw data that is returned from the search server to perform simple name-value pair mapping.

Indexing (including preprocessing) is performed and launched from the WebSphere Commerce server. After index preprocessing successfully completes, the Data Import Handler (DIH) can be run from the same WebSphere Commerce server. Solr can start creating and updating the Lucene index from the WebSphere Commerce temporary database tables. If preprocessing is not required, such as for the inventory extension index, the DIH process can be started either from WebSphere Commerce or directly from a URL issued against the WebSphere Commerce Search server.