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User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
Tutorials
WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your WebSphere Commerce instance and stores.
WebSphere Commerce search
WebSphere Commerce provides tutorials that are designed to describe how to customize WebSphere Commerce search.
Indexing external data in WebSphere Commerce search
In this tutorial, you add the ability to index data from a data source that is external to the WebSphere Commerce database. You then add Management Center support for ranking product search results based on the indexed customer ratings data. In this tutorial, your external source data is product ratings from customers.
Preprocessing the search index data
In this lesson, you preprocess the search index data to prepare the customer ratings data for indexing. The preprocess utility extracts and flattens data. Then, the utility outputs the data into a set of temporary tables inside the WebSphere Commerce database.

User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to WebSphere Commerce Version 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in a newer section.WebSphere Commerce is a single, unified e-commerce platform that offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), directly with businesses (B2B), and indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models). WebSphere Commerce is designed to be a customizable, scalable, and high availability solution that is built to leverage open standards. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels.
- Planning
  Creating a custom implementation of a WebSphere Commerce store requires a significant amount of planning. From gathering client needs, to deploying the live solution, much work is needed to successfully deploy a custom client store. Use the resources in here to help you plan every phase of store creation.
- Installing
  Review the following sections for information about installing the WebSphere Commerce product, associated maintenance, and WebSphere Commerce enhancements.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to WebSphere Commerce Version 8.0, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Deploying
  The topics in this section describe how to publish stores to either a test or production environment, and how to deploy customized code.
- Operating
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using WebSphere Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
- Tutorials
  WebSphere Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your WebSphere Commerce instance and stores.
  - Programming model
    WebSphere Commerce provides tutorials that are designed to introduce the various tasks that are related to creating customized code to develop and enhance WebSphere Commerce applications. The following tutorials provide sample guides to customizing elements of the WebSphere Commerce programming model.
  - Web services
    Web services tutorials introduce the various tasks that are related to creating and customizing web services for WebSphere Commerce applications.
  - Management Center
    WebSphere Commerce provides tutorials that are designed to introduce the various tasks that are related to customizing Management Center.
  - WebSphere Commerce search
    WebSphere Commerce provides tutorials that are designed to describe how to customize WebSphere Commerce search.
    - Indexing external data in WebSphere Commerce search
      In this tutorial, you add the ability to index data from a data source that is external to the WebSphere Commerce database. You then add Management Center support for ranking product search results based on the indexed customer ratings data. In this tutorial, your external source data is product ratings from customers.
      - Extend the catalog entry search index schema
        In this lesson, the search schema is extended to add ranking fields for the customer ratings data. These customer ranking fields are used to index customer ratings as XML input data from an external source.
      - Configuring the search preprocessor
        In this lesson, you modify the preprocessor configuration file to support custom data. You add support for your custom data by adding a custom configuration file that references the required processing Java classes and the temporary customer ranking table information. Preprocessing tasks are controlled by the wc-dataimport-preprocess XML files. The files contain table definitions, database schema metadata, and references to the Java classes that are used in the preprocessing steps.
      - Preprocessing the search index data
        In this lesson, you preprocess the search index data to prepare the customer ratings data for indexing. The preprocess utility extracts and flattens data. Then, the utility outputs the data into a set of temporary tables inside the WebSphere Commerce database.
      - Configuring the Data Import Handler mapping
        In this lesson, you extract the data for the custom fields from the temporary relational table in the search schema. The data extraction is handled by the Data Import Handler, which uses configuration files that include predefined SQL query lines that extract WebSphere Commerce data. To extend the extraction scope, you append queries for the customer ratings data to the files for the handler.
      - Building the search index
        In this lesson, you run the full index build to incorporate the fields and the extraction mappings.
      - Registering the new field in search tables
        In this lesson, you use SQL statements to register the new ratings field in the search-related database tables.
      - Customizing the UserData property name mapping and search configuration
        In this lesson, you modify the UserData field name mapping to map the new columns to the UserData field of the CatalogEntryView noun. You also create a search profile to return your custom data. As a result, the search results in your store can include the customer ratings data.
      - Modifying the Aurora starter store to display the custom data
        In this lesson, you customize the Aurora starter store to display the customer ratings information for catalog entries.
    - Indexing profit margin data for use in dynamic product recommendation
      In this tutorial, you customize WebSphere Commerce search to use specific search conditions to dynamically recommend products to customers based on the profit margin for the products.
  - Starter stores
    WebSphere Commerce provides tutorials that are designed to introduce the various tasks that are related to customizing the storefront.
- Samples
- Developing
  The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage WebSphere Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of WebSphere Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
- Troubleshooting

Preprocessing the search index data

In this lesson, you preprocess the search index data to prepare the customer ratings data for indexing. The preprocess utility extracts and flattens data. Then, the utility outputs the data into a set of temporary tables inside the WebSphere Commerce database.The data in the temporary tables is used by the index building utility in the next lesson. The utility uses the data in this table to populate the the search indexes with the Data Import Handler (DIH).

Procedure

Stop the WebSphere Commerce Test Server.
In a command-line utility, go to the WCDE_installdir\bin directory.
Run the preprocessing utility by running the following command.
- di-preprocess.bat Search_home\pre-processConfig\MC_masterCatalogID\dbtype
Query the TI_RATING table to confirm that the ratings information is populated.