WebSphere Commerce EnterpriseWebSphere Commerce Professional

Planning a customization to the IBM Sales Center

The following steps are a general overview of the actions required to customize the IBM Sales Center.

About this task

You can use steps to these to plan your customization effort.

Procedure

  1. Determine what you want to customize.
    • For example, you may decide that you want to add new fields to the Identity page of the customer editor to display the last time the customer logged into the store.
  2. Determine the unique identifier, or ID, of the graphical user interface element that you want to modify.
    • Continuing the example, you must determine the ID of the Identity page of the customer editor. By examining the com.ibm.commerce.telesales.ui.impl.customer plug-in's fragment.xml file, and reading the comments within the file, you can determine that ID of the default definition of the Identity page is customerIdentityCompositeDefinition.default. The Identity page is composed of many smaller definitions for each section of the page. Examine the definitions to determine exactly which section you want to modify. You can also enable the 'widget hover logging' option described in the steps in determining the ID of a user interface element.
  3. In the IBM Sales Center development environment, create a plug-in project.
  4. Write your own definition of the user interface element.
    • If you want to reuse existing user interface elements, use the referenceId to reference the existing definition instead of redefining it in your plug-in.
  5. If data must be sent from the client to the server you must add information to your user interface elements. For example,
    • If you want to send a name-value pair from the client to the server, use a property tag to add the name-value pair to the BOD. For more information see the Create a set of control widget elements step in the Adding a new search term in the IBM Sales Center tutorial.
    • If you want to send parameters to a controller command on the WebSphere Commerce server, ensure you set the modelPath value. See the Modify the user interface step of the Modifying a page in an editor tutorial and Extending the UserData element for more information.
  6. Create a properties file to store any locale-specific text. Extend the resource bundle extension point, com.ibm.commerce.resources.resources, to indicate the name and location of your properties file.
  7. Declare the system configurator using the system configurator extension point. This involves creating a config/config.ini directory and file. In this file, indicate that the IBM Sales Center should use your definition of the user interface element instead of the default definition.
  8. If necessary, write code on the WebSphere Commerce server side to process data.
    • For example, you could write code to send the date of the user's most recent log in date from the server to the client. See Extending the UserData element for more information.
  9. Test your changes.
  10. Once you are satisfied with your changes, export the plug-in and distribute the plug-in, for example as a feature using an update site created in Rational Application Developer to which the IBM Sales Center clients will connect. See deploying customizations to the IBM Sales Center.