Workspaces with Commerce Search

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 Commerce Lab to preview a workspace, undo submitted tasks, reject, cancel, or approve task groups.

All workspaces use the Elastic search index. This index is created after deployment of the Elastic docker containers. Each workspace related change is stored as a document in the Elastic search index. This is also a workspace index, which is used to store workspace change history details for all the workspaces created in an authoring environment.

The overall flow of the workspaces

The following list describes the overall flow of the workspaces:
  • IT administrators enable workspaces.
  • Workspace manager creates workspaces in the Workspace Management tool in Commerce Lab.
  • Content contributors create, update, or delete objects within a workspace.
  • The data gets indexed for use in Store Preview:
    • The existing NiFi data flow pipelines (NRT, Dataload, full re-indexing) stream and process the data.
    • The Elastic search index gets updated either by updating the existing base document or by creating a new document for the workspace. For existing documents, the base document gets updated with the workspace reference. If there is no existing document, then a new document for the workspace gets created.
    • Workspace change history gets stored in the workspace index to track workspace related changes.
  • Content contributors view the updates (unapproved content) in Store Preview. The Query service retrieves the data from the Elastic index and returns it at the Store Preview based on the search criteria provided by the business users to preview unapproved content.
  • Content approvers or workspace managers approve a task/task group.
  • All the changes that are associated with a task/task group are committed to the production-ready data on the authoring environment.
  • The approved content is then published to the Live environment.

Limitations

  • Search Term Association (STA) is not supported within a workspace. If the business user adds or deletes any synonym, then it cannot be tested in Store Preview while working in a workspace. A task/task group should be approved and committed to production-ready data to test the synonym. If any issue is found while testing the synonym in the production-ready data, then the synonym should be removed from the production-ready data.
  • Rule-based sales categories are not supported within a workspace. If the business users enable rule-based sales categories within a workspace, then it cannot be tested in Store Preview while working in a workspace. .