Common business tasks and their impact to the HCL Commerce Search index
There are impacts to the search index when certain business tasks are performed. Ensure
that you are aware of your daily tasks when they might require search index rebuilds.
General guidelines
Certain business tasks might introduce a significant impact to the production system. This is due to certain changes that trigger a full reindexing, which might vary in time from several minutes to hours, depending on the catalog size. The following general guidelines highlight the business actions that you can perform during business hours, and those to avoid:
Perform the following business actions during business hours, as they do not pose a significant
risk to production system performance:
- Creating a sales catalog that results in adding new categories only.
- Updating an existing category property.
- Changes made to any new or existing products, SKUs, packages, or bundles.
- Product attachments should be updated with their associated products.
- Adding or updating attribute dictionary attributes.
- Updating default price lists for any product.
- Adding or updating any type of marketing activity. For example, Web activities, Dialog activities, or search rules.
- Adding or updating search term associations.
- Committing or canceling any task groups.
- Undoing any uncommitted operations within tasks.
Avoid performing the following business actions during business hours, as they might affect
performance to the production system:
- Reparenting an existing category. This triggers a full reindexing, which is not suitable during business hours where the system usage is high.
- Removing an existing category or a subcategory from a catalog. This triggers a full reindexing, which is not suitable during business hours where the system usage is high.
- Individual attachments should not be reloaded or deleted separately. This operation must be performed with an associated product.
Warning: By default, the updateSearchIndex scheduled job runs a
full index update. Do not run the updateSearchIndex scheduled job in any full
index configurations on a production environment.
The inventory index contains operational data and therefore can be used only for previewing in an authoring environment. IT administrators can set up a recurring task to take snapshots of inventory status from a production environment and use them in an authoring environment for previewing, testing, and tuning of search rules.
Common business tasks that affect the search index
The following table highlights the common business tasks and their impact to the search index in
an authoring or staging environment, where:
- An authoring environment is one that has a workspace that is enabled and business users can use this environment to perform changes within a workspace. Once the workspace gets approved, committed data (from the base schema) can be reindexed and then published to the production environment through index replication.
- A staging environment is similar to an authoring environment, with the exception that it does not have workspace that is enabled. Business users can still make changes in this staging environment, but changes are made immediately to the search index in this staging environment.
Note: All reindexing types that are listed in the table are denoted against the product index
and not the category index, except where indicated (Category business component).
| Business component | Business task | Reindexing type |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog: master or sales catalog | Linking or unlinking to an existing category from a catalog tree | Delta: Product and Category index Note: A delta reindex is
performed only if the number of changes that are affected by the business task is less than the
DeltaIndexingThreshold threshold.
|
| Changes to an association of existing product to a catalog | Delta: Product index | |
| Store: direct business model | Adding a new stand-alone direct model store that uses a separate master catalog | Full: All indexes |
| Store: extended business model | Adding a new extended site that uses an existing indexed catalog asset store | Not required |
| Adding a product, or delete an existing product from an existing extended site | Delta: Product index | |
| Catalog entry: product, package, bundle, kit, item | Adds a product, or delete an existing product | Delta: Product index |
| Updates any existing property or adds a property to an existing catalog entry, such as the product description, product name, brand name, thumbnail, images, SKU | Delta: Product index | |
| Updates any existing or adds new package or bundle | Delta: Product index | |
| Associating or removing a product attribute from an existing product | Delta: Product index | |
| Reparent a catalog entry | Delta: Product index | |
| Category | Adds a category | Delta: Category index |
| Deletes an existing category | Full | |
| Updates any existing property or adds a property to an existing category, such as the category description, thumbnail, images | Delta: Category index | |
| Reparent a category | Delta: Product and Category index | |
| Merchandising association | Updates or adds new merchandising association | Not required |
| Attribute Dictionary attributes | Adding or removing any value of a newly created product attribute in the attribute dictionary | Not required |
| Updates to any value of an existing attribute in the attribute dictionary that is associated with products. | Delta: Product index | |
| Updates made to an associated catalog entry's Attribute Dictionary attributes or their allowed values. | Delta: Product index | |
| Attributes | Updates to any value of a newly created or existing product attribute | Delta: Product index |
| Adding or removing any value of an existing product attribute | Delta: Product index | |
| Adding or removing a product attribute | Delta: Product index | |
| Associated asset | Uploads a new attachment and associates with an existing product | Delta: Product and Unstructured index |
| Reuploads or deletes an existing attachment that is associated with only one product | Delta: Product and Unstructured index | |
| Reuploads or deletes an existing attachment that is associated with existing products | Delta: Product and Unstructured index | |
| Price | Updates to any existing or adds a new (default) price rule to a store | Delta: Product index |
| Updates to store default offer price for a product | Delta: Product index | |
| Updates to list price for a product | Not required | |
| Contract | Creating or changing a contract using Catalog Filter from within the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. | Full |
| Marketing |  Adding, changing, or deleting an existing marketing
activity (Web, Dialog) |
Not required |
| Search rule | Adding, changing, or deleting an existing search rule | Not required |
| Search term association | Adding, changing, or deleting an existing search term association | Not required |
| Versioning | Rollback or forward to another version of a category | Delta: Product and Category index |
| Rollback or forward to another version of a product | Delta: Product index | |
| Inventory | Updates to the inventory search index | Full: Inventory index |
Common business tasks that affect the search index with workspaces enabled
The following table highlights the available index types for approved content (base) and workspaces.All reindexing types that are listed in the table are denoted against the
following indexes:
| Index type | Approved Content (base) | Workspace |
|---|---|---|
| Product index | Yes | Yes |
| Category index | Yes | Yes |
| Unstructured index | Yes | Yes |
The following table highlights the common business tasks and their impact to the
search index in an environment with workspaces:
Note: Upon approving a task group that contains
catalog changes:
- Indexing is triggered against the base schema to index the workspace changes under the Approved content index, and
- Indexing is required against the workspace schema to clean up the approved changes from the workspace index.
| Business component | Business task | Reindexing type | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Approved Content | Workspace | ||
| Catalog: master or sales catalog | Linking or unlinking to an existing subcategory from a catalog tree | Delta: Product and Category index | Delta: Product and Category index |
| Linking or unlinking for a top category | Full: All indexes | Full: All indexes | |
| Changes to an association of existing product to a catalog | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Create Sales Catalog | Not required | Not required | |
| Update Catalog description | Not required | Not required | |
| Update default Catalog | Not required | Not required | |
| Store: direct business model | Adding a new stand-alone direct model store that uses a separate master catalog | Full: All indexes | Full: All indexes |
| Store: extended business model | Adding a new Extended Site that uses an existing indexed catalog asset store | Not required | Not required |
| Adding a product, or delete an existing product from an existing Extended Site | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Catalog entry: product, package, bundle, kit, item | Adding a product, or delete an existing product | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index |
| Updating any existing property or adding a property to an existing catalog entry, such as the product description, product name, brand name, thumbnail, images, SKU | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Updating any existing or adding a package or bundle | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Associating or removing a product attribute from an existing product | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Reparenting a catalog entry | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Updating the sequence of a catalog entry within a category | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Unpublish a product (Display to customer not selected in the Management Center) | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Category | Adding a subcategory to an existing category | Delta: Category index | Delta: Category index |
| Deleting a subcategory from an existing category | Full: All indexes | Full | |
| Updating any existing property or adding a property to an existing category, such as the category description, thumbnail, images | Delta: Category index | Delta: Category index | |
| Reparenting a category | Delta: Product and Category index | Delta: Product and Category index | |
| Updating the sequence of a sales category when Expanded Category Navigation is disabled | Delta: Category index | Delta: Category index | |
| Updating the sequence of a sales category when Expanded Category Navigation is enabled | Delta: Product and Category index | Delta: Product and Category index | |
| Unpublish a category (Display to customer not selected in the Management Center) | Delta: Category index | Delta: Category index | |
| Unpublish a category (Display to customer not selected in the Management Center) when deep category unpublish is enabled | Full: Product and Category index | Full: Product and Category index | |
| Merchandising association | Updating or adding new merchandising associations | Not required | Not required |
| Attribute Dictionary attributes | Adding a value to an existing attribute dictionary attribute | Not required | Not required |
| Updating or removing any value of an existing attribute in the attribute dictionary that is associated with products | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Adding an attribute dictionary attribute | Not required | Not required | |
| Marking an attribute dictionary attribute as searchable or facetable | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Removing an attribute dictionary attribute | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Attributes | Updates to any value of a newly created or existing product attribute | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index |
| Adding or removing any value of an existing product attribute | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Adding or removing a product attribute | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Associated asset | Uploading a new attachment and associating it with an existing product | Delta: Product and Unstructured index | Delta: Product and Unstructured index |
| Uploading or deleting an existing attachment that is associated with one or
more products Note: You must also update the product |
Delta: Product and Unstructured index | Delta: Product and Unstructured index | |
| Price | Updates to default store offer price for a product | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index |
| Contract | Creating or changing a contract using Catalog Filter from within the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. | Full: All indexes | Full: All indexes |
| Marketing | Adding, changing, or deleting an existing Web
or Dialog activity
|
Not required | Not required |
| Search rule | Adding, changing, or deleting an existing search rule | Not required | Not required |
| Search term association | Adding, changing, or deleting an existing search term association | Not required | Not required |
| Versioning | Rollback or forward to another version of a category | Delta: Product and Category index | Delta: Product and Category index |
| Rollback or forward to another version of a product | Delta: Product index | Delta: Product index | |
| Inventory | Updates to the inventory search index | Full: Inventory index | Full: Inventory index |
Example: Reading a table row for common business tasks
- When a business user is working on a workspace schema and creating a new product in the Catalogs tool, a delta reindexing is required to update the workspace product index.