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HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. 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. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
Securing
These topics describe the security features of HCL Commerce and how to configure these features.
Authorization
HCL Commerce views access control or authorization as the process of verifying that users or applications have sufficient authority to access a resource. This section describes the details of several aspects of HCL Commerce access control.
Customizing default access control policies
The default access control policies that are provided by HCL Commerce address the basic requirements that organizations have for regulating the actions and information available to their users. Often, the default policies can be sufficient for your site's needs. At the same time, the default policies are highly customizable, so that you can tailor them to your own requirements.
Defining access control policy elements using XML
The Organization Administration Console allows you to make simple changes to access control policies and their parts. To make more sophisticated changes, you need to edit the XML files directly, and then load them into the database.

Documentation
HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. 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. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
- Getting started
  HCL Commerce has different advantages for business users, administrators and developers. HCL Commerce targets each of these roles with a tailored set of offerings so that each of your users can get maximum benefit.
- Installing and deploying
  Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Operating
  Topics in the Operating category highlight tasks that are typically performed by business users, customer support representatives, to complete their day-to-day tasks in the operation of the HCL Commerce site.
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
  Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
- Customizing
  The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
- Tutorials
  HCL Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your HCL Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
  Topics in the Samples category highlight the various samples that are provided with HCL Commerce.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage HCL Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of HCL Commerce and how to configure these features.
  - HCL Commerce security model
    Authentication is the process of verifying that users or applications are who they claim to be. In an HCL Commerce system, authentication is required for all users and applications that access the system, except for guest customers.
  - HCL Commerce authentication model
    The HCL Commerce authentication model is based on the following concepts: challenge mechanisms, authentication mechanisms and user registries.
  - Authorization
    HCL Commerce views access control or authorization as the process of verifying that users or applications have sufficient authority to access a resource. This section describes the details of several aspects of HCL Commerce access control.
    - Access control policy
      An access control policy authorizes a group of users to perform a set of actions on a set of resources within HCL Commerce. Unless authorized through one or more access control policies, users have no access to any functions of the system. To understand access control policies you need to understand four main concepts: users, actions, resources, and relationships. Users are the people who use the system. Resources are objects in the system that need to be protected. Actions are the activities that users can perform on the resources. Relationships are optional conditions that exist between users and resources.
    - Access control policy groups
      HCL Commerce supports various business models, and each business model has its own set of access control policies. In order to group the sets of policies within the models, policy groups were created. Policies are explicitly assigned to appropriate policy groups and then organizations can subscribe to one or more of these policy groups. For example, in the following diagram, Seller Organization subscribes to Seller Organization Policy Group, and Root Organization Policy Group.
    - Enforcing access control
      Policy Manager is the access control component that determines whether the current user is allowed to execute the specified action on the specified resource. Access control policies are specified in XML format. During instance creation, the default policies and policy groups are loaded into the appropriate database tables. When HCL Commerce Application Server is started up, the access control information is cached in memory so the Policy Manager can quickly check a user's authorization when called to do so. If access control information is changed in the database through the Administration Console, or by loading XML policy data, the access control cache needs to be updated. You can update the cache by updating the appropriate registry in the Administration Console. If policy data is changed, then update the Access Control Policies registry. If policy group data is changed, update the Access Control Policy Groups registry. Restarting HCL Commerce also updates the cache.
    - Evaluating access control policies
      This section can be used as a guide to evaluating access control policies. In this section, you are presented with a scenario and guided through an example of how to evaluate groupable standard and groupable template access control policies. Each section begins with a description of related policies, and scenarios using each policy.
    - Example: Examining an access control policy
      In this section, you look at one of the default policies in detail, using a series of different examples. The policy you will study is the following:
    - Default access control policies
      The default policies shipped with HCL Commerce are organized into the following categories:
    - Default access control policy groups
      The default access control policy groups that are shipped with HCL Commerce are the following:
    - Customizing default access control policies
      The default access control policies that are provided by HCL Commerce address the basic requirements that organizations have for regulating the actions and information available to their users. Often, the default policies can be sufficient for your site's needs. At the same time, the default policies are highly customizable, so that you can tailor them to your own requirements.
      - Relationships between role-based and resource-level policies
        This topic describes how policies are related to each other and why you need to understand their relationships before you can modify an existing policy, or create a new one. In many cases, you need to change several policies to properly implement a change.
      - Role-based and resource-level policies
        Role-based policies are also known as command-level policies because they authorize users with a particular role to execute a set of commands. Resource-level policies authorize a group of users to execute a set of commands on a particular set of resources. For instance, a role-based policy might authorize children to eat. While a resource-level policy might authorize children eat rice.
      - Defining access control policy elements using XML
        The Organization Administration Console allows you to make simple changes to access control policies and their parts. To make more sophisticated changes, you need to edit the XML files directly, and then load them into the database.
        Access control files
        The following table provides the names and descriptions of the default HCL Commerce access control files (XML and DTD files). HCL Commerce loads these default files when you create your instance.
        Protecting views
        Any view that is called directly from an URL, or that is launched as a redirect from another command, needs a role-based access control policy in order to be displayed.
        Protecting controller commands
        All controller commands require a role-based access control policy in order to be executed. A controller or task command also requires a resource-level policy if the command is doing resource-level checking.
        Protecting resources
        You can add resource-level access control to controller or task commands. Resource-level checking is done at HCL Commerce runtime, based on data returned by the getResources() method of a command. Resource-level checking can also be done during the performExcecute() portion of the command by making direct calls to the access control policy manager using the method void checkIsAllowed(Object resource, String action) throws ECException. This method will throw the ECApplicationException if the current user is not allowed to perform the specified action on the specified resource.
        Protecting data beans
        Data beans contain information about business objects and are used to display object information about a Web page. Dynamic Web pages are usually mapped to views within HCL Commerce, and these views are protected by role-based policies. It is sometimes necessary to further protect the content of the Web page by protecting its data beans, if they exist.
        Grouping resources by attributes
        You may find that a resource policy that is based on class names needs to be more fine-grained than the default policies provided with HCL Commerce. An implicit resource group definition will provide the flexibility to protect resources of a particular state. For example, if you want to create a policy in where all users can run the OrderRead command on orders that has status 'P' or 'E', then you will need to define a resource group as shown below.
        Defining relationships
        A relationship provides the ability to grant a user access to a resource that is based on the user's relationship with the resource. If a relationship is defined in the policy, for a user to have access to the resource, the user must also satisfy the relationship with the resource in addition to satisfying the User Group, Action Group and Resource Group definitions. For example, an administrator may want to define a policy that only allows the creator of an order to update it. This type of policy definition is done through relationships.
        Defining relationship groups
        If multiple relationships are required to grant a user access to certain resource, use the RelationGroup construct. However a relationship usually satisfies most of the requirement for this scenario. Relationship groups contain open conditions which are the conditions for belonging to the relationship group. If you need to define relationship groups, you must do so by defining the relationship group information in your XML file, or by modifying the defaultAccessControlPolicies.xml file.
        Defining access groups
        An access group is a required element in a policy definition. It defines which users are entitled to act upon which resources. There are many instances where it is necessary to define a new access group.
        Defining policies
        There are many instances where it is necessary to define a new access group.
      - Loading access control policy data
        If you make policy changes by working directly with the XML files, you must load the changed XML files back into the databases.
      - Testing access control policy changes
        Each time you create or modify an access control policy, you must perform certain tests to verify that the policy is working correctly.
      - Examples: Customizing access control policies using the Organization Administration Console
        For all of these examples, it is assumed that a Site Administrator is modifying the policies for Root Organization. Once you step through some of the examples, you will be able to follow the same methodology to make changes not specifically covered here.
  - Hardening site security checklist
    To harden the security of your HCL Commerce site, you can enable and configure various security features. In addition, site customizations must always be made to comply with best practices as outlined in this document.
  - Site security considerations
    To enhance the security of your HCL Commerce site, you can enable various features in Administration Console or in the HCL Commerce configuration file.
  - Session management
    Browsers and e-commerce sites use HTTP to communicate. HTTP is a stateless protocol, which means that each command is run independently without any knowledge of the commands that came before it. Because it is a stateless protocol, sessions must be managed between the browser side and the server side.
  - Quick reference to user IDs, passwords, and Web addresses
    Administration in the HCL Commerce environment requires a variety of user IDs. These user IDs along with their requisite authorities are described in the following list. For the HCL Commerce user IDs, the default passwords are identified.
  - Enabling WebSphere Application Server security
    You can enable WebSphere Application Server security, which includes two orthogonal components: WebSphere global security and Java 2 security.
- Performance
  Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce site performance.
- Troubleshooting
  Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with HCL Commerce, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
- Reference
  Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.

Defining access control policy elements using XML

The Organization Administration Console allows you to make simple changes to access control policies and their parts. To make more sophisticated changes, you need to edit the XML files directly, and then load them into the database.

About this task

Before you begin making changes to the XML files for access control, you should read the topics HCL Commerce Developer Access Control and Creating an access control policy. These topics provide a technical overview of access control and explains how to create customized commands, entity beans, and JSP templates that can be protected by access control policies.

Once you have finished the code customization, you can edit the XML files for access control to establish the protections you require.

The following changes can only be made by editing and then loading the appropriate XML files:

Creating or modifying an action
Creating or modifying a relationship
Creating or modifying a relationship group
Creating or modifying a resource
Creating or modifying attributes
Creating or modifying access groups using complex criteria
Creating or modifying resource groups using complex criteria
Creating a role-based policy for views
Changing the action group in a role-based policy for views
Creating or modifying a policy group
Associating policies with policy groups

You can manipulate the XML files to perform the following authorization tasks: