Membership profile management

A basic user profile incorporates registration information, demographics, address information, purchase history, and other miscellaneous attributes. A business user profile contains the same information as a basic user profile, as well as employment information, such as an employee number or a job title, or a job description. The business profile may also contain a link to the business organization to which the user belongs.

Profiles for organizational entities include the information, such as organization name and business category. Create profiles with the UserRegistrationAdd and the OrgEntityAdd commands. You can update profiles with the UserRegistrationUpdate, BuyerRegistrationAdd, ResellerRegistrationAdd, and OrgEntityUpdate commands. The address commands ( AddressAdd, AddressDelete, and AddressUpdate) manage addresses for users and organizational entities. Mass registration of profiles into the HCL Commerce database are permitted using the massload utility. Access control rules enforce who can perform profile management.

Member profiles can contain a variety of multi-valued personal and business-related attributes (such as roles, payment information, addresses, preferred languages and currencies, and pervasive computing devices). Attributes are store-sensitive. Multi-valued and context-sensitive attributes are not supported for member groups.

Profiles are extendable and the profile data can be stored either in a database or in a directory server. When a database is used, profile data is stored in the BUSPROF, CERT_X509, MBRATTR, MBRATTRVAL, MBRVIEWPRF, ORGENTITY, USERDEMO, USERPROF, USERPVCDEV, USERREG, and USERS database tables. Note that the MBRATTR and MBRATTRVAL tables can be used to define and store additional member attributes not covered by other tables and without having the need to extend the database schema. For example, if you are interested in capturing data on professional associations that a user belongs to, instead of adding a new column called PROFESSIONALASSOC to one of the tables, define the PROFESSIONALASSOC attribute in the MBRATTR table and store its values in the MBRATTRVAL table. The MBRATTRVAL table also allows you to easily store multiple values for an attribute. When the directory server is used as the registry, the profile data is stored in the directory server using standard object classes, and to the HCL Commerce database.