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HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. 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. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
Customizing
The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
Presentation layer
HCL 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.
Management Center
The Management Center for HCL Commerce framework is the foundation for HCL Commerce business user tooling. The business objects that are managed with Management Center are defined by the individual components that make up Management Center. The Management Center framework uses these definitions to provide the features that you can use to find, create, modify, and delete the defined business objects. If you plan to customize the Management Center, ensure that you understand the framework and all of the components that make up Management Center.
Customizing an existing Management Center tool
You can customize Management Center tools to change the presentation of each tool and to add or change the support for managing business objects within each tool. You can customize any of the provided tools, except for the Installments tool.
Creating widgets in Management Center
Widgets are Management Center user interface elements that display and edit business object properties. A widget refers to any Management Center user interface element, such as a check box or a radio button.

Documentation
HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. 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. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
- Getting started
  HCL Commerce has different advantages for business users, administrators and developers. HCL Commerce targets each of these roles with a tailored set of offerings so that each of your users can get maximum benefit.
- Installing and deploying
  Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Operating
  Topics in the Operating category highlight tasks that are typically performed by business users, customer support representatives, to complete their day-to-day tasks in the operation of the HCL Commerce site.
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
  Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
- Customizing
  The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
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  - Managed asset deployment
    Managed assets are files that are uploaded by business users to be used for store marketing, or to supplement products. They are added to HCL Commerce through the Assets tool or the Marketing tool in Management Center. By default, managed assets are extracted and deployed through the HCL Commerce EAR. To maintain performance in a large-scale production environment, site administrators must switch to alternative extraction and deployment methods for managed assets.
  - What's new for developers
    Learn about the new features and functions HCL Commerce offers developers.
  - HCL Commerce development environment
    HCL Commerce Developer is the development toolkit for customizing a HCL Commerce application.
  - 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
    HCL 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.
  - Creating your custom store
    After you install and set up your programming environment, you can create your custom store and customize your storefront. You must ensure that the store server is properly configured, and that your store assets are moved to the Store server.
  - Presentation layer
    HCL 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.
    - HCL Commerce Struts framework
      Struts is a well documented, mature and popular framework for building front ends to Java applications. To address concerns in software applications, it uses a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture: The Model represents the business or database code, the View represents the page design code, and the Controller represents the navigational code.
    - Spring framework
      The Spring Framework is a lightweight, open source programming and configuration model for developing Java based enterprise applications. This framework is used in HCL Commerce for building and configuring Management Center, including the managing of URL requests from Management Center to retrieve and process object data.
    - Management Center
      The Management Center for HCL Commerce framework is the foundation for HCL Commerce business user tooling. The business objects that are managed with Management Center are defined by the individual components that make up Management Center. The Management Center framework uses these definitions to provide the features that you can use to find, create, modify, and delete the defined business objects. If you plan to customize the Management Center, ensure that you understand the framework and all of the components that make up Management Center.
      - Management Center customization best practices and modeling guidelines
        To customize Management Center, you can change some files that are provided by HCL Commerce and create your own custom configuration files to define custom objects or features for your store. Before you begin customizing Management Center, consider how HCL Commerce provided maintenance fixes or upgrades can affect your custom objects and changes. By following the correct customization approach, you can ensure that fixes and upgrades do not overwrite your customizations when you install a maintenance fix or upgrade to a later release.
      - Management Center definitions
        The Management Center framework uses configuration information within XML files to control the display and behavior of objects that are available and used in Management Center. These XML files are referred to as definition files.
      - Management Center user interface
        The Management Center user interface consists of individual management tools and the shell that includes all of the individual tools. Each tool and the overall Management Center shell consist of several elements.
      - Management Center services
        The Management Center framework uses different types of services to communicate with the HCL Commerce Server.
      - Customizing the Management Center shell
        You can customize the Management Center shell, which encompasses all of the common (non-tool-specific) aspects of the Management Center. The shell includes the Management Center Tools menu, the banner, Management Center tool tabs, and the status area.
      - Customizing an existing Management Center tool
        You can customize Management Center tools to change the presentation of each tool and to add or change the support for managing business objects within each tool. You can customize any of the provided tools, except for the Installments tool.
        Changing the display name for a business object
        The Management Center framework uses the display name of a business object to identify the object when that object displays in Management Center. The display name for an object can display in the explorer view, utilities view, list views, and properties views.
        Changing the text style for object display names
        The Management Center framework uses the display name of a business object when that business object is shown in the user interface. You can change the text style, such as the color or font style, that is used for the business object display names in the explorer view. For example, by changing the style, business users can more easily see key information about a business object.
        Adding a column to a list view
        You can add a column to an existing Management Center list view, such as for displaying information from a custom database table column.
        Changing a column name in a list view
        You can change the name of a column heading for an existing Management Center list view.
        Adding or changing options in a drop-down list
        You can customize the properties view for a business object to add or change a list option that displays in an existing list. Business users can then select from the customized list of options.
        Adding words to spell checker dictionaries
        You can customize the Management Center spell checker dictionary to add words or phrases so that the words or phrases are no longer flagged as misspelled words. For example, you can add words that are specific to your company, such as product names, to the dictionary to avoid having the spell checker flag the words as misspelled.
        Rearranging the contents of a properties view
        You can rearrange the contents within the properties view for a business object in a Management Center tool. For example, you can move tabs, sections, or widgets within a properties view to suit your business needs.
        Adding a tab to a properties view
        You can add a tab to an existing Management Center properties view. The Management Center framework includes properties views for business users to use to create and update business objects.
        Moving content from one properties view tab to a new tab
        You can move the contents from an existing tab in the properties view for a business object to a new tab.
        Changing the section name within a properties view
        Within the properties view for business objects in Management Center, information can be grouped into collapsible sections. You can customize the properties view for a business object to customize the collapsible sections to meet your business needs. For example, you can change the name of a General Information section to be named Basic Properties.
        Adding or changing a widget label within a properties view
        You can include various widgets within a Management Center properties view, such as a field, a rich text editor, a radio button, and more. You can also customize a properties view to change the text labels for existing widgets. For example, you can change the label to rename the Name field to be Description.
        Changing the search definition for a business object
        Search definitions define the characteristics of an object search type hat is available in Management Center when a business user is searching for business objects. You can customize the search definitions for an object type to change the characteristics that are used or display when a user searches for a business object.
        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.
        Defining user interface text in Management Center
        Include text on the Management Center user interface, such as in the main work area (list, properties, or calendar views), search, explorer view, menu, message, and help text. You can customize the messages and labels that display in Management Center to make the text that display more appropriate for your own business users.
        Creating widgets in Management Center
        Widgets are Management Center user interface elements that display and edit business object properties. A widget refers to any Management Center user interface element, such as a check box or a radio button.
        Creating list view widgets
        Management Center list view widgets can display and be used to edit business object properties. If your business users need to view different groups of properties or properties for custom objects, you can create list view widgets to meet your business user needs.
        Creating properties view widgets
        The properties view for business objects can display different widgets for displaying and editing business object properties. If your business users need to view different properties in properties views, you can create a properties view widget to meet your business user needs.
        Examples: Adding Management Center properties view widgets
        By reviewing code samples that create some common properties view widgets, you can better understand how to implement these widgets in your own properties views. The code samples also illustrate how to make a required property and how to add an enablement condition for certain properties.
        Changing validation logic
        You can include client-side validation logic for Management Center. Create validation rules for information that business users provide through the user interface. For example, validate that text is entered by a user instead of numbers, or that a start date is before an end date, or that a mandatory field is entered.
        Adding a custom service to Management Center
        You can define a custom service and associate it with a Management Center business object definition. Use a custom service to perform a processing action on a business object. For example, to activate a promotion. Do not use a custom service to perform the basic business operations, such as to create, update, and delete objects.
      - Working with the subscriptions component configuration file
        To change any properties in the subscriptions component configuration file (SubscriptionConfigurationImpl.xml), you must create a customized version of the file in a new folder. The customized version of the file must contain only the changed properties. You can modify the subscriptions component configuration file to change the name of attributes you want to use with subscriptions or to adjust the cancel grace period.
      - Management Center test automation framework
        You can use the test automation framework to write test cases that validate the Management Center model, services, and object definitions. The test framework is not intended to validate Management Center user interface widgets, such as properties views and list views.
    - Developing Commerce Composer assets
      Enrich the capabilities of the Commerce Composer tool by developing your own widgets and templates, and extending other features and functions to suit your business needs.
    - Customizing promotions
      Customizing promotions can involve the customization of the promotion business user tools and the underlying promotion engine, which features a clean architecture supporting rich functionality, as well as a wide array of customization possibilities.
    - Working with the promotions component configuration file
      Some Management Center components, like the promotions component, have customizable configuration files. These files contain properties that control certain component features.
    - Customizing marketing
      You can customize marketing features and objects to better meet the business needs of your site. For example, you can customize e-Marketing Spots, customer segments, activities, activity components, such as triggers, targets and actions, and more. Customization is supported for the Marketing tool in Management Center and for the storefront to display e-Marketing Spots.
    - Customizing price rules
      You can customize price rules to suit the business needs of your site. For example, you can create a new condition or action for business users to add to price rules. Customization is supported for both the Price Rule Builder tool user interface in the Catalog Filter and Pricing tool, and for the pricing services.
    - Customizing store preview
      You can customize store preview to add enhancements that help business users work more efficiently. These enhancements include the click-to-edit function and in-context preview function.
    - Customizing content versioning
      The content versioning feature is enabled for some objects in the Catalogs tool in Management Center. You can add or remove content versioning support for existing objects and custom objects by customizing both Management Center and HCL Commerce server.
    - Customizing the infrastructure component
      Customizing the infrastructure component provides you the ability to change configurable properties for Management Center and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) functionality.
    - Developing JSP pages
      To create JSP pages for HCL Commerce, you should have Rational Application Developer skills and JSP skills. You should also be familiar with JSTL.
    - HCL Commerce JSP programming best practices
      This section offers the following selection of JSP programming best practices, which promote development of reusable and easily maintainable JSP pages within the HCL Commerce store development framework:
    - Double-click handling in HCL Commerce
      The purpose of double-click handling in HCL Commerce is to prevent processing the same request twice to ensure data integrity within the system. When processing certain URL requests, such as OrderItemAdd, the double-click feature of HCL Commerce will identify whether the request from the online shopper is currently being processed and blocks the current request if that is the case.
  - 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. HCL 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 HCL Commerce, you need to determine the business model supported by HCL Commerce that best represents the purpose of your site. Usually sites created with HCL 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 Transaction 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 HCL Commerce
    You can extend the HCL 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 HCL Commerce Developer to take tutorials that guide you step-by-step through various customization scenarios.
  - Run Engine command framework
    The Run Engine command framework provides predefined commands, that you can use to change environment parameters or container configurations. This framework is built into the HCL provided Docker images.
  - Representational State Transfer (REST) services
    HCL Commerce uses Representational State Transfer (REST) services to provide a framework that can be used to develop RESTful applications on several platforms. These platforms can include web, mobile, kiosks, and social applications.
  - Web services
  - Search
    HCL Commerce comes with a powerful and fully integrated search function. The search functions in HCL Commerce provide an enriched customer experience, with features such as automatic search term suggestions and spelling correction. Since it is built on industry standards, HCL Commerce Search is highly flexible and extensible. Starter stores can use the search engine's most sophisticated features without requiring extra customization.
- Tutorials
  HCL Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your HCL Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
  Topics in the Samples category highlight the various samples that are provided with HCL Commerce.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage HCL Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of HCL Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
  Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce site performance.
- Troubleshooting
  Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with HCL Commerce, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
- Reference
  Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.

Creating widgets in Management Center

Widgets are Management Center user interface elements that display and edit business object properties. A widget refers to any Management Center user interface element, such as a check box or a radio button.

A Management Center widget displays or edits business object properties in list views and properties views. The following diagram shows the relationship between the definitions that are used for list view widgets and the definitions that are used for properties view widgets.

Relationship between definitions for widgets.

Several widgets are provided for you to use in list views and properties views. Before you build your own list view or properties view widgets, refer to the definition information for the following widget types to determine whether an existing widget type can suit your business needs.

List view widgets	Properties view widgets
GridText GridRichText GridDisplayName GridIconTypeImage GridStoreName GridPropertyImage GridImage GridDateTime GridDate GridKilobytes GridNumeric GridStepper GridComboBox GridCheckbox GridLanguages GridCurrencySelector	PropertyRadioGroup PropertyInputText PropertyInputLongText PropertyInputMultiLineText PropertyRichTextEditor PropertyDatePicker PropertyDateTimePicker PropertyTimePicker PropertyViewLongText PropertyKilobyte ImageEditor PropertyList PropertyStepper PropertyCurrencyValueEditor PropertyNumericText PropertyDaysSelect PropertyCombobox PropertyCheckbox PropertyCurrencySelector