Preprocessing the search index data

In this lesson, the search index data is preprocessed to prepare your WebSphere Commerce data for indexing. The preprocess utility extracts and flattens WebSphere Commerce data and then outputs the data into a set of temporary tables inside the WebSphere Commerce database. The data in the temporary tables is used by the index building utility to populate the data into WebSphere Commerce search indexes with the Data Import Handler (DIH).

Preprocessing for offer price is required because you must index each currency of the offer prices. However, the preprocessing stage is not always required. The cost price contains only one currency, so you do not need to flatten it to a summary table. The focus here is to calculate the profit margin and index it in the actual indexing stage. You are not indexing the cost price data because you are not using this data directly in this tutorial.

In this lesson, you must ensure that the offer price data is preprocessed. You are not preprocessing any cost price, as the cost price has only one currency and is flat enough to be used for indexing.