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Documentation
This Help Center provides documentation on all aspects of the HCL Commerce+ Transaction Server product, from installation and deployment to operating and customization.
Administering
The site administrator performs the tasks needed to support day to day operations of the Commerce+ Transaction Server site.
Dynamic caching
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 Open Liberty Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
Custom request attributes for servlet caching
You can create custom request attributes for servlet caching by adding them to the <map> tag.

Documentation
This Help Center provides documentation on all aspects of the HCL Commerce+ Transaction Server product, from installation and deployment to operating and customization.
- Overview
  Welcome to the HCL Commerce+ Transaction Server overview. Explore these feature overviews to learn how Commerce+ Transaction Server operates. Refer to the related links listed at the end of each topic to access expanded product documentation.
- Deploying
  This section provides details on deploying HCL Commerce+ Transaction Server. It explains how to download the Docker images and Git bundles that comprise the product, how to create a minimal environment, and how to plan for a full deployment. It details supported software versions, patches, and configurations to ensure the platform performs well.
- Migrating
  The following topics show how to migrate an existing HCL Commerce Version 9.1 environment to Commerce+ Transaction Server.
- Operating
  The topics in this section focus on tasks that are performed by business users, marketers, and customer support representatives to connect with partners and attract and satisfy customers.
- Administering
  The site administrator performs the tasks needed to support day to day operations of the Commerce+ Transaction Server site.
  - Member groups
    A member group is a grouping of members - users, organizations, or other member groups - used for various business purposes. Two kinds of member groups exist: implicit and explicit. An implicit member group contains users that share common attributes and are therefore considered members of a specific member group. An implicit member group specifies criteria or attributes that users must satisfy in order to be considered members of that member group. You can also explicitly exclude certain users although they satisfy the criteria. An explicit member group contains explicitly assigned users, who may or may not share common attributes. A member group can be both implicit and explicit at the same time.
  - Inventory management
    Use the HCL Commerce+ Inventory to manage your inventory and access your Inventory Locations (ILs), where your inventory is physically stored and is delivered or shipped from.
  - Approvals
    Accurate, secure transactions require that a second individual approve some electronic marketplace actions before they proceed. This individual, called an approver, can accept or reject requests to perform a specific action. During the organization registration process, the organization administrator selects the business processes for which they want to enable approval. This is done by signing up for the appropriate approval member group during membership registration. The organization administrator also populates the approver member groups. Only users within these groups have the authority to accept or reject requests to perform those actions for which approval has been enabled.
  - System Administration
    Commerce Lab allows you to manage transport, messages, scheduler, Connectors, registries, and security policies.
  - Staging environment
    An Commerce+ Transaction Server staging environment is a runtime environment where business and technical users can update and manage store data and preview changes. The changes can then be propagated to the production environment.
  - Workspaces
    Workspaces provide a powerful and flexible way to manage and preview changes to your e-commerce website without affecting the live production environment.
  - Commerce+ Transaction Server database
    As a site administrator, maintain the Commerce+ Transaction Server database and ensure that any Commerce+ Transaction Server utilities and processes that load and retrieve data from the database is configured to connect to the database properly.
  - Dynamic caching
    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 Open Liberty Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
    - Cache invalidation
      In order to maintain the relevance of cached data, based on time, user or other variables, the data will have to be invalidated or removed from the cache. Dynacache provides different methods for performing cache invalidation. There are four methods to invalidate the cache.
    - Configuring the dynamic cache service in cachespec.xml
      The dynamic cache service is an in-memory cache system that has disk offload capability. Cacheable objects are defined in the cachespec.xml file.
    - Custom request attributes for servlet caching
      You can create custom request attributes for servlet caching by adding them to the <map> tag.
    - ***
    - Updating cache sizes
      You can independently configure the size of each cache that is used in Commerce+ Transaction Server. The size of each cache is defined by its number of entries and by its size in megabytes (MB). The number of entries is a maximum size, not the current actual size, and the size in MB is the maximum memory footprint.
    - Cache-entry elements
      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.
    - Enabling JSP caching
      Caching e-Marketing Spot JSP snippets can lead to a performance improvement.
  - Extracting and loading data
    Commerce+ Transaction Server provides utilities for preparing and loading data into a Commerce+ Transaction Server database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the Commerce+ Transaction Server schema.
  - Administering Search
    HCL Commerce+ Transaction Server Search provides the core search capability for Commerce+ Transaction Server, enabling product indexing and retrieval for customer queries across the storefront. It supports guided navigation, landing pages, and dynamic merchandising, helping shoppers quickly find relevant products while giving merchandisers tools to influence search results.
- Extending
  Using Commerce+ Transaction Server's xC programming model, you can use HCL-provided extension points to extend existing Commerce logic. You can implement these extensions with the xC Customization toolkit provided by HCL. Commerce+ also provides Packaged Business Capability integrations that extend the product's reach and functionality.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of Commerce+ Transaction Server 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 Commerce+ Transaction Server site performance.
- Troubleshooting
  Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with Commerce+ Transaction Server, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
- Reference
  Topics in the Reference section contain all of the Commerce+ Transaction Server reference documentation.

Custom request attributes for servlet caching

You can create custom request attributes for servlet caching by adding them to the <map> tag.

In a store that runs in the Transaction server, the DynaCacheFilterMappings component tag in the wc-server.xml file has a property that defines several <map> tags.

In a store that runs in the Store server, set this configuration in the workspace_dir/xml/config/wc-store.xml file.

Each <map> tag defines how a request attribute can be added to the HttpServletRequest object. Each <map> tag can specify the following attributes:

className

The fully qualified Java class name of the class that provides a static method that can be called to determine the attribute value.

dynacacheAttributeName

The name of the attribute to be added to the HttpServletRequest object.

methodName

The name of a static method of the class that is specified by the className attribute. The static method returns a java.lang.String and accepts the following parameters:

javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest: The request object
com.ibm.commerce.command.CommandContext: The command context for this request
java.lang.String: The name of the attribute (the value of the dynacacheAttributeName <map> configuration attribute).
When the returned String value is not null and is not empty, it is added to the HttpServletRequest by using the setAttribute method.

You can call the MyClass.getMyAttributeValue method on each request to generate an attribute value for a request attribute that is named "MyAttribute", which is then added to the request object. To call this method on each request, specify the following <map> tag:


<map
   className="com.mycompany.MyClass"
   display="false" dynacacheAttributeName="MyAttribute"
   methodName="getMyAttributeValue" name="getMyAttributeValue"/>