Adding folder support to Management Center tools

You can add folder support to any Management Center tool to provide business users with the ability to group objects of the same type. By grouping objects, business users can improve the organization and management of those objects.

About this task

To add folder support you must create your folder objects, and customize Management Center to display and support folders. By adding folder support to a tool, business users can associate and disassociate store objects with folders. Users, however, can associate only those store objects that are specific to a folder type as folder items within that folder. You cannot combine store objects that belong to different tools, such as promotions and attributes, as folder items in the same folder. A promotions folder can have only promotion folder items that are associated with the folder. By default HCL Commerce provides support for adding the following Management Center objects as folder items into folders:
Folder item types

This table documents the folder types that are supported by default in HCL Commerce and the object type that can be included within the folder type.
Management Center tool Management Center object types Supported folder types Supported folder item types
Promotions tool Promotion IBM_PromotionFolder PromotionType
Catalogs tool Attribute IBM_AttributeFolder AttributeDictionaryAttributeType
Marketing tool Activity IBM_ActivityFolder ActivityType
Content IBM_ContentFolder MarketingContentType
Customer Segment IBM_CustomerSegmentFolder MemberGroupType
e-Marketing Spot IBM_EMarketingSpotFolder MarketingSpotType
Commerce Composer tool Content pages IBM_ContentPageFolder PageType
Layouts IBM_LayoutFolder LayoutType
If you are customizing Management Center to support a different folder type to organize a Management Center object, do not use one of the supported folder item types. To add support for folders for a Management Center object, you must define a new folder type and folder item type that supports the object. Do not combine different types of folder items in a single folder. Only the supported folder item type displays within a folder in Management Center. For more information about folders, see Folders.
Note: Multiple language support is not available for folders. Folders displays with the name and description you specify when you are creating the folder, regardless of what language you are working in with Management Center.

Procedure

  1. Extend a properties file to contain the text for your folders that display in the user interface. You must register your property file in a resource bundle that contains the locale-specific objects f your folder.
  2. Define the folder primary object definition. The primary object describes a top-level business object that is independent of other objects. This primary object defines the base object from which your tool folders are derived.
  3. Define the reference definitions for your folder objects. Define any references between folder objects and parent folders as a parent reference object definition. Define the reference between your folders and the objects that are to be included with your folders as a reference object definition.
  4. Define two new list views to display your folder objects and the store objects that are associated with the folder objects. You must define one list view to list the store objects that are associated with a folder. Your second list view is to list the sub folders included within a folder.
  5. Define a properties view for your folders to display your folder details.
  6. Update the top objects to display your folders in the Management Center explorer view.
  7. Create the JSP files for enabling your folder service. You must connect your Management Center user interface to your services to return folder information from your services. You must also register the JSP files in the Spring configuration. For more information about JSP files, see Developing JSP pages. For more information about creating JSP files, see Creating and registering new storefront JavaServer Pages files
  8. Update your Management Center tool access control to provide access rights for business users of your Management Center tool. You must provide access rights to users to provide users the ability to access the folder services. Add access control policies to give a business user role access to folders from a specific tool. For more information about implementing access control, see Access control in the BOD command framework
  9. Verify that your customization is complete. As a business user, open your Management Center tool and add and delete objects to and from your tool folders. If you can successfully manage your folder objects, your customization is successful.