Commerce Composer page creation

If your site supports the use of the Commerce Composer tool in Management Center, you can create store pages that can be managed with the Commerce Composer tool.

In the Commerce Composer tool, a page is a specific URL on your storefront. You can create pages directly with the Commerce Composer tool, or by using the Data Load utility. You can also convert existing store pages that are not supported by the Commerce Composer tool to be Commerce Composer pages. Think of a page as just a URL, with no content. The content of a page is defined by its layout. When you create a page, you can also create a layout for the page, assign an existing layout to the page, or use the default layout for the page group.

For more information about Commerce Composer pages, see Pages and page creation.

When a page is created for a store in Management Center, all users can view the page. New Commerce Composer pages map to the same Spring views and JSP files as existing pages and have the same access control policy associated. These new pages do not have any context information that is generated by default for the pages other than the associated store ID, language, page ID, and catalog ID. The pages do not include any additional context information by default, such as category or product IDs, search terms, or more.

Creating pages with the Commerce Composer tool

To create a page with the Commerce Composer tool, complete one of the following tasks:

Creating pages with the Data Load utility

  1. To create a page with the Data Load utility, you must first create the input file that includes your page information. You can create either a CSV input file or an XML input file to load your page information. Within your input file, you must include the appropriate CSV column names or XML elements, and the corresponding values. For more information about the information to include within your file, see page input file.
    If you want to load SEO metadata information for your new page, you must create additional input files to include this information. For more information about the information to include within these files, seeIf you want to assign a layout to your new page, create the input file to load this layout assignment information. For more information about the information to include within these files, see layoutAssignment input file
    Note: To copy a Commerce Composer page from one instance to another instance, you can use the Data Extract and Data Load utilities. Use the Data Extract utility to extract the page data and then use the Data Load utility to load the extracted data into the target instance. For more information, see Extracting Commerce Composer data with the Data Extract utility.
  2. With your input files created, you must configure and run the Data Load utility. To configure this utility, you must create a load order configuration file, an environment configuration file, and business object configuration files to define how to load page, SEO, and layout assignment information. By default HCL Commerce provides sample configuration files that you can use. These sample files are in the following directory:
    • WCDE_installdir\components\foundation\samples\DataLoad\CommerceComposer
    You can copy and use the following sample files from this directory to configure the Data Load utility to load your page information:
    • wc-dataload-page.xml - This load order configuration file is within the page subfolder.
    • wc-dataload-env.xml - The data load environment configuration file.
    • wc-loader-page - The business object configuration file for loading page information.
    • wc-loader-seopage - The business object configuration file for loading SEO information for a page.
    • wc-loader-seopagedesc.xml - The business object configuration file for loading SEO information in multiple languages for a page
    • wc-loader-layoutAssignment.xml - The business object configuration file for loading a layout assignment for a page.
      Note: You can also load the information to create a layout, create a layout template, and create new widgets for your page. If you want to load this information, you must copy the business object configuration files for loading these objects from the CommerceComposer directory. You must also create the appropriate input files and any required storefront or management center assets for the objects. For more information about loading these objects, see Commerce Composer samples.

    You must update the provided wc-dataload-env.xml environment configuration file to match your system and database environment settings. If you are not including data into custom columns, you can use business object configuration files without updating the files. Update the provided wc-dataload-page.xml load order configuration file to include the file paths to your business object configuration, environment configuration, and CSV or XML input files. The file paths are relative from the load order configuration file. For more information about configuring these files, see Configuring and running the Data Load utility.

  3. After you create and configure your Data Load files, Run the Data Load utility.

For a sample that uses the provided configuration files and loads sample page data with the Data Load utility, see

For a sample that uses the provided configuration files and loads sample page data with the Data Load utility, see Sample: Loading Commerce Composer pages.