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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.
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+.

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+.
      - Query Service
        The Query service builds the search expressions and then hands the expression to Elastic. It also takes the query results and translates them back into a form that can be used by the storefront.
      - The Elastic index lifecycle
        Structure, advantages and lifecycle of the Elastic system.
      - Storefront product/SKU data display logic
        This topic describes how the Elastic 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 Elastic.
      - 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
        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.
      - HCL Commerce Search limitations and restrictions
        Some features of the HCL Commerce+ environment are currently not supported or have specific functional limitations. The list below reflects the current state of supported capabilities and known restrictions. Features marked as deprecated have been or will be replaced by Elastic framework methods and interfaces.
    - 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.
  - 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.

Introduction to Commerce Search

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+.

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Elastic consists of the Ingest, Indexing, and Query Data microservices. These microservices communicate seamlessly with your Transaction server, storefront, and Xc customizations. In addition, they provide:

Fully integrated with Elastic as the default core search technology.
Enhanced multilingual support with over 30 built-in language-specific analyzers for text analysis such as tokenization, stemming, stop words.
Dynamic index shards allow more nodes to be dynamically added and rebalance data automatically across the cluster with zero downtime.
Hot-swapping of newly-built indexes using index aliases. Re-indexing has minimal impact on your live index cluster.
Fast incremental snapshots, which allow you to backup at frequent intervals.
Multitier marketing and features near-realtime updates.
Kubernetes-ready deployment interface.
Seamless service upgrade and version control. New features and bug fixes are delivered continuously.

In Commerce+, you typically only need to administer the Query service. This service builds search expressions and then hands them to the Elastic engine. It also takes the query results and translates them back into a form that can be used by the storefront.

The Docker container stack that runs the microservices uses the Spring Boot framework.

The following diagram shows the architecture of Commerce Search. The microservices in the main box were inside the monolithic Search container in Version 9.0. These services have now been broken out into their own containers and communicate via the Data Environment.