Tutorial: Adding search conditions for advanced search in the Catalogs tool

In this tutorial, you add search conditions to the Advanced Search dialog in the Catalogs tool. You extend the advanced search with two new conditions: warranty type and warranty term.

Users can perform complex searches that contain several search conditions in the Advanced Search dialog in the Catalogs tool.


Figure 1: Advanced Search dialog before customization
When you customize the Advanced Search dialog to include more properties of the catalog entry as search conditions, users can search more precisely. When you customize the advanced search, you add user interface widgets to the Advanced Search dialog. These widgets are used by the business user to specify their search criteria and the values for the search criteria are passed to the search service. In this tutorial, you extend the advanced search with two new conditions: warranty type and warranty term.
Figure 2: Advanced Search dialog after customization

These extended properties are added in the catalog entry in Tutorial: Adding fields in the Catalogs tool. Deploy all of your customized code at the same time. If you complete both tutorials and you are deploying to your production server, deploy after you complete both tutorials.

Learning objectives

After completing this tutorial, you should be familiar with the following concepts:

  • Advanced Search dialog
  • Search definitions
  • The expression builder

After completing this tutorial, you should be familiar with the following tasks:

  • Extend the Advanced Search dialog to include extended properties as search
  • Extend the controller JSP file to transfer extended search parameters
  • Configure parametric search to search on custom data
  • Create an expression builder to override a default expression builder
  • Add the extended properties as a column to a list view.

Time required

Expect this tutorial to take two hours to complete.

Skill level

This tutorial is intended for advanced WebSphere Commerce developers responsible for creating and customizing WebSphere Commerce services. To complete this tutorial, familiarize yourself with the following terms and concepts:

System requirements

Before you begin this tutorial, ensure that you complete the following tasks:

Tutorial resources

You can download the completed tutorial code for this tutorial for your reference: