Feature Pack 5 or later

Tutorial: Configuring WebSphere Commerce for device detection and redirection to device-specific storefronts

Feature Pack 5 or laterIn this tutorial, you learn how to configure WebSphere Commerce for device detection and redirection to device-specific storefronts.

WebSphere Commerce can be configured to detect the device that is used to browse the store and serve device-specific JSP content. This configuration expects that a one-to-one mapping of JSP files exists between the stores between which redirection occurs in order to render the same page content in each device-specific storefront. For example, if you published the Aurora starter store, smartphone starter store, and tablet starter store, each storefront has a device-specific version of TopCategoriesDisplayView.jsp.

This tutorial demonstrates how to complete various tasks. For example, how to modify the Struts configuration, modify the default search engine optimization (SEO) feature, and customize existing store JSP files to enable redirection to the specific storefront based on a device cookie.

The benefits of this approach include:
  • Improving the social sharing experience by providing a single URL to customers that visit from any touchpoint. For example, a customer visits a product page on their mobile device and wants to share the URL with a friend through their Facebook smartphone app. When the friend opens the URL from their desktop, the friend is taken to the desktop version of the product page.
  • Providing URL canonicalization – a standardized URL structure across all storefronts that might also improve search engine visibility for your site. Multiple URLs that map to the same content with device-optimized styling might distribute 'the page ranking of your site. This tutorial extends the use of the canonical category and product SEO URLs to the smartphone and tablet starter stores where possible.

This tutorial covers the basic steps to enable redirection of pages in the catalog navigation flow, such as the home page, category pages, and product pages. To extend redirection beyond the main catalog navigation flow, more JSPs might need to be created or updated by following the lessons in this tutorial.

Learning Objectives

After completing this tutorial, you should be able to perform the following tasks:
  • Update the Struts configuration file to include new actions and new forward mappings to device-specific pages.
  • Create and update SEO patterns.
  • Modify the SEO patterns and parameters of wcf:url tags in the storefront, applying the SEO pattern file changes.
  • Propagating SEO pattern changes to storefront customization tasks, including JSP, JSPF, and JavaScript modification.

Time required

Expect this tutorial to take 2 hours to complete. The tutorial takes longer if you explore concepts that are related to the tutorial.

Skill level

This tutorial is intended for store developers and search engine optimization specialists. To complete this tutorial, you should be familiar with the following concepts

System requirements

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