Home
Documentation
This Help Center provides documentation on all aspects of the HCL Commerce+ 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+ site.
Administering Search
HCL Commerce+ Search provides the core search capability for Commerce+, 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.
Commerce+ Solr and Elasticesearch
In keeping with HCL's commitment to current and open standards, Commerce Search uses Apache Lucene as the basis of its Search framework. Lucene powers the Apache Solr search engine and the Elasticsearch search engine. The indexing pipeline is a more open, flexible and scalable and is tightly integrated with the data service. Using the underlying dataflow technology and architecture, you can easily customize the pipelines. This open-standards approach considerably eases the process of integrating Search with existing and third-party applications.
Elasticsearch-based solution
The Commerce+ introduces a new service for inputting and organizing your data. This new version of Commerce Search is a generic data management system that can be used by other Commerce subsystems, including but not limited to the Elasticsearch engine. Along with the Ingest service that brings in the data, the new Query service provides natural language processing, color recognition and more. For customers who need backwards-compatibility, the previous Apache Solr-based search solution is still available.
Applying patches
The following topics describe how to apply patches received from Commerce+ to NiFi, the NiFi Registry, and the Query service.

Documentation
This Help Center provides documentation on all aspects of the HCL Commerce+ product, from installation and deployment to operating and customization.
- Overview
  Welcome to the HCL Commerce+ overview. Explore these feature overviews to learn how Commerce+ 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+. 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+. The process consists of an initial migration of your database contents. This is followed by a code migration. Both are fully described.
- 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+ 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+ 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+ database
    As a site administrator, maintain the Commerce+ database and ensure that any Commerce+ utilities and processes that load and retrieve data from the database is configured to connect to the database properly.
  - Extracting and loading data
    Commerce+ provides utilities for preparing and loading data into a Commerce+ database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the Commerce+ schema.
  - Administering Search
    HCL Commerce+ Search provides the core search capability for Commerce+, 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.
    - Overview
      Discover how Search enables catalog browsing indexing, and product discovery across Commerce+ storefronts while preserving core legacy configurations during migration.
    - The search service
      Commerce Search includes a data ingest component and the powerful indexing and query services of the Elastic engine.Commerce+ PBCs are SaaS services. In day to day operations they function like internal components of Commerce, but when a PBC is upgraded, its improvements become instantly available to Commerce+.
    - Commerce+ Solr and Elasticesearch
      In keeping with HCL's commitment to current and open standards, Commerce Search uses Apache Lucene as the basis of its Search framework. Lucene powers the Apache Solr search engine and the Elasticsearch search engine. The indexing pipeline is a more open, flexible and scalable and is tightly integrated with the data service. Using the underlying dataflow technology and architecture, you can easily customize the pipelines. This open-standards approach considerably eases the process of integrating Search with existing and third-party applications.
      - Comparing Solr and Elasticsearch architectures
        The Solr and Elasticsearch systems behave similarly at the storefront level. Behind that layer are key differences in architecture.
      - Comparing Solr and Elasticsearch index lifecycles
        Apache Solr and Elasticsearch have different approaches to updating your search index. Solr does delta updates on a regular schedule, usually every five minutes. Elasticsearch performs an incremental update in near real-time.
      - Comparing Solr and Elasticsearch common business tasks and their impact on the search index
        There are impacts to the search index when certain business tasks are performed. This topic describes the Solr and Elasticsearch comparison for the common business tasks and their impact on the search index. The following table lists the common business tasks and reindexing types for Solr and Elasticsearch. The table groups business tasks and reindexing types by business components.
      - Migrating from Solr to Elasticsearch
        The following table describes the Solr-based and Elasticsearch-based search solutions and their concepts. A guideline is also presented for migrating from the Solr-based search solution to the newer Elasticsearch-based solution.
      - Developer Solr-based Search environment
      - HCL Commerce Developer Solr-based Search environment
      - Orchestration service
        The Orchestration service enables the Ruby starter store to use Solr-based search. The Ruby store uses the V2 search REST API that is only compatible with Elasticsearch. With the Orchestration service, the ability to convert a JSON message from one format into another is introduced.
      - Elasticsearch-based solution
        The Commerce+ introduces a new service for inputting and organizing your data. This new version of Commerce Search is a generic data management system that can be used by other Commerce subsystems, including but not limited to the Elasticsearch engine. Along with the Ingest service that brings in the data, the new Query service provides natural language processing, color recognition and more. For customers who need backwards-compatibility, the previous Apache Solr-based search solution is still available.
        Applying patches
        The following topics describe how to apply patches received from Commerce+ to NiFi, the NiFi Registry, and the Query service.
        Applying a custom processor patch to NiFi
        Complete the following steps to apply the custom processor patch to NiFi.
        Removing a custom processor patch applied to NiFi
        Complete the following steps to remove the custom processor patch applied to NiFi.
        Applying an Ingest Connector patch to NiFi
        Complete the following steps to apply an ingest connector patch to NiFi.
        Applying a class patch to Ingest
        Complete the following steps to apply a class patch to NiFi.
        Removing a class patch applied to Ingest
        Complete the following steps to remove a class patch from NiFi.
        Applying a NiFi flow patch to NiFi Registry
        Complete the following steps to apply patch to NiFi Registry.
        Applying a patch to the Query service
        Complete the following steps to apply a custom processor patch to the Query service.
        Ingest Service
        The Ingest service is responsible for bringing data into Commerce Search. This data, which can be in many different formats, is passed to Apache NiFi, which prepares it for use by Elasticsearch. To administer the Ingest service, you define a data specification to write NiFi descriptors. Each descriptor defines the behavior of a particular connector. Strung together, the connectors manage the data pipeline and that builds your index.
        Query Service
        The Query service builds the search expressions and then hands the expression to Elasticsearch. It also takes the query results and translates them back into a form that can be used by the storefront. The storefront does not need to know that the response was generated by Elasticsearch rather than Solr.
        The Elasticsearch index lifecycle
        The Elasticsearch index lifecycle describes the structure of Elasticsearch indices in Commerce+, highlights the advantages of the architecture, and explains the typical index lifecycle, including creation, updates, Push-to-Live processes, backup management, and optimisation techniques.
        Indexing contract prices
        You can index prices in Commerce Search. For example, you can build the Commerce Search price index by issuing the Calculate Price RESTful call, and then indexing contract prices.
        Storefront product/SKU data display logic
        This topic describes how the Elasticsearch index overrides the product/SKU data or inherits the product data for SKU and displays it accordingly on the storefront.
        Performance tuning the Ingest service
        You can tune search performance at data ingest time by adjusting your NiFi settings, or at runtime by changing the memory options for Elasticsearch.
        Fine-grained cache invalidation
        Live fine-grained cache invalidations are sent from the Push-to-live connector. Fine-grained cache invalidation allows scoping cache invalidation to individual products or categories to rebuild only the necessary cache. It helps to minimize the runtime impact at the time of cache invalidation. You can create a custom template for product and category invalidation. This means you can set the desired product and category cache invalidation and the place to send this custom invalidation.
        Workspaces with Commerce Search based on Elasticsearch
        Using workspaces in an authoring environment, business users can work on catalog-related changes in an isolated environment. They can then preview their changes in the storefront before submitting them for approval. Content approvers or workspace managers then use the Workspace Management tool in the Management Center to preview a workspace, undo submitted tasks, reject, cancel, or approve task groups.
        Logging and troubleshooting
        Approaches and systems for troubleshooting your Ingest and Query services are discussed.
        HCL Commerce Search limitations and restrictions
        Some features of the Commerce search environment are unsupported for the initial release of the Commerce Search. These features will be restored in future point releases. Some features are deprecated because they have been or will be replaced by specific Ingest or Elasticsearch methods and interfaces.
      - Solr -based solution
        The Solr search index lifecycle includes tasks that you perform after Commerce+ search is deployed. For example, building, replicating and propagating the search index, backing up and restoring the search index, and monitoring indexing activities across different search servers.
  - Logging services
    Commerce+ maintains a detailed set of logs related to a variety of processes and functions. These logs are available upon request.
  - Business events
    Each time that a command triggers a business event, a record is added to the BUSEVENT database table to persist data from the event. Event listeners and external systems (such as the Marketing component, a back end order management system, or an external analytics system) can use this data to perform further processing.
  - Business Object thresholds
    Applying limits on business operations reduces the risk of system attacks where unbound conditions might result in system failures.
- Extending
  Using Commerce+'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+ 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+ site performance.
- Troubleshooting
  Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with Commerce+, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
- Reference
  Topics in the Reference section contain all of the Commerce+ reference documentation.

Applying patches

The following topics describe how to apply patches received from Commerce+ to NiFi, the NiFi Registry, and the Query service.