Adding support for external recommendations to the Management Center user interface

You can expose a prebuilt user interface that allows business users to define the criteria for displaying recommendations from external systems. By default, this user interface does not display in the Management Center Marketing tool because it is commented out in the code, but you can remove the comments. You might also need to customize the user interface to meet your business requirements.

Before you begin

Decide whether you need to customize the prebuilt Display Recommendation from External System action element. Without customization, the properties view for the element looks like this:
User interface for Display Recommendation from External System

About this task

To use the prebuilt Display Recommendation from External System action element as is, you must expose it in the Activity Builder in the Marketing tool. This involves editing the properties view file for the Activity Builder so that the element displays in the palette. Business users can then drag the element from the palette into a Web activity and complete the properties shown in previous screen capture.

Customizing the prebuilt action element requires additional work.

Procedure

  1. Open WebSphere Commerce Developer and switch to the Enterprise Explorer view.
  2. If required, customize the Display Recommendation from External System action element. For example:
    • To add or remove widgets in the properties view, modify:
      • the mktDisplayExternalRecommendationProperties definition in the original source file. This definition is found here:

        WebSphere Commerce DeveloperLOBTools/WebContent/config/commerce/marketing/propertiesViews/activityBuilder/DisplayExternalRecommendationPropertiesView.def

    • To customize the object definition for the element, modify:
      • the DisplayExternalRecommendationFlowElementObjectDefinition definition in the original source file. This definition is found here:

        WebSphere Commerce DeveloperLOBTools/WebContent/config/commerce/marketing/objectDefinitions/activityBuilder/DisplayExternalRecommendationFlowElementObjectDefinition.def

    Your customization might require additional changes. The topics linked from Adding a trigger, target or action provide useful reference information about the code that supports action elements in the Marketing tool.

  3. Expose the prebuilt Display Recommendation from External System action element in the Activity Builder for the Marketing tool:
    1. Complete one of the following steps:
      • In the Enterprise Explorer view, expand LOBTools > WebContent > config > commerce > marketing > propertiesViews.
    2. Open the properties view file that contains the palette for Web activities:
      Option Description
      WebActivityBuilder.def
      1. Locate the following code: 
        <!-- This prebuilt element is available for customizations to use when the 
     DisplayExternalRecommendationActionTaskCmd task command is implemented. 
<Element objectType="displayExternalRecommendation"/>
-->
      2. Remove the comments so the element is no longer commented out.
      3. Save and close the file.
      4. If you want business users to be able to create Web activity templates using the Display Recommendation from External System action element, repeat steps 3.b.i through 3.b.iii for the WebActivityTemplateBuilder.def file . This properties view contains the palette for Web activity templates.