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.
Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.
The HCL Commerce database model was designed for data integrity and optimal performance. HCL Commerce provides several hundred tables that store HCL Commerce instance data. To maintain data integrity, and to ease maintenance referential integrity, constraints are widely used in the database model. Indexes are used carefully on tables to avoid over-indexing and to provide a good balance between data retrieval and data manipulation activities (insert and update). The business rules are implemented at the application level rather than by using database trigger. Triggers, however, are used to facilitate data staging and optimistic locking. A limited number of SQL-based database stored procedures are used for data intensive activities.
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.
Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9.1, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
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.
Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
HCL Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your HCL Commerce instance and stores.
Topics in the Samples category highlight the various samples that are provided with HCL Commerce.
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.
These topics describe the security features of HCL Commerce and how to configure these features.
Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce site performance.
Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with HCL Commerce, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
HCL Commerce exposes two main programming APIs. The first and newest API is a REST interface, and most new classes are exposed here. The legacy Java API also contains new classes not suitable for REST, and can be browsed in Javadoc format.
Data beans are grouped into several component groups.
URL commands, controller commands, task commands, view commands and tables are related to each other.
Use this information when you are customizing a command and you want to know which tables are affected. You should also use this topic if you are modifying a table and want to know which commands and beans are affected.
The following Run Engine commands are available by default for you to configure the applications that are running inside the containers.
To enter a Docker container you can complete the following steps.
When you deploy a container from an HCL provided image, an Entrypoint.sh helper script determines the configurations to use while starting up the container. Review the following information to learn about what the helper script does, and how you can customize the configurations.
Several column data types are available for you to use when you are creating new database table or columns.
Database tables and columns within the HCL Commerce Version 9 database schema can differ from the tables and columns in the database schema for HCL Commerce Version 8.
If a database table or column is marked as deprecated, then the table or column is outdated by newer constructs. Deprecated sections are supported for reasons of compatibility with an earlier version only. These tables or columns are obsolete or can become obsolete in future versions of HCL Commerce.
Any given database data model displays the relationship among database tables in the schema.
In HCL Commerce, payment processing uses the Payments subsystem.
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.
The root element of the cachespec.xml file, <cache>, contains <cache-entry> elements. The WebSphere dynamic cache service parses the cachespec.xml file during start-up, and extracts a set of configuration parameters from each <cache-entry> element.
<cache>
<cache-entry>
The Data Load utility contains several configuration files. You can use the configuration file schema to understand and customize the data load configuration files.
HCL Commerce provides many web services.
In HCL Commerce utilities are scripts that perform operations such as loading access control policies, loading store data, and cleaning the database of obsolete objects. In runtime environments, run utilities from the Utility server Docker container. In the development environment, run utilities from the bin directory.
HCL Commerce shopping flow URLs are organized by subsystem.
The following URLs relate to the Messaging system.
The server subsystem consists of functions that are associated with URLs that are run by the scheduler.
The Aurora starter store in HCL Commerce is completely written in jQuery, which is one of the most commonly used JavaScript libraries used in dynamic websites. The jQuery AJAX and events API provides an easy to use framework that meets most AJAX requirements for storefront development.
The HCL Commerce foundation JSTL tag library is a collection of custom tags that are provided to you to support the authoring of HCL Commerce JSP files. HCL Commerce stores use the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) to perform logic, instead of Java code. At the same time, business logic is moved into data beans. The combination of these steps allows for less Java code in a JSP page.