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.
The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
HCL Commerce comes with a powerful and fully integrated search function. The search functions in HCL Commerce provide an enriched customer experience, with features such as automatic search term suggestions and spelling correction. Since it is built on industry standards, HCL Commerce Search is highly flexible and extensible. Starter stores can use the search engine's most sophisticated features without requiring extra customization.
In keeping with HCL's commitment to current and open standards, HCL Commerce Search uses Apache Lucene as the basis of its Search framework. Lucene powers the Apache Solr search engine. This open-standards approach considerably eases the process of integrating Search with existing and third-party applications.
HCL Commerce Search contains extension points that can be used for customization. If you are migrating from a previous version of the product, there are mandatory and optional areas to work with, depending on your existing customizations. In the following topics the available customization points are described, and you are given detailed instructions on customizing each.
The HCL Commerce Search index life cycle provides numerous extension points. There are eight main stages to the life cycle, and each of these comes with its own extension opportunities. Your primary tool for customization is the configuration files that control the indexing process. Beyond configuration, you can build and integrate your own custom code.
The base index schema can be extended to suit your business needs. For example, to separate data into different indexes that are based on their refresh intervals.
You can customize several areas of the search run time.
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.
Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
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.
Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
Managed assets are files that are uploaded by business users to be used for store marketing, or to supplement products. They are added to HCL Commerce through the Assets tool or the Marketing tool in Management Center. By default, managed assets are extracted and deployed through the HCL Commerce EAR. To maintain performance in a large-scale production environment, site administrators must switch to alternative extraction and deployment methods for managed assets.
Learn about the new features and functions HCL Commerce offers developers.
HCL Commerce Developer is the development toolkit for customizing a HCL Commerce application.
Functional architecture provides both the set of patterns used to implement the business functionality and the frameworks in which these business functions execute.
HCL Commerce deals with a large amount of persistent data. There are numerous tables defined in the current database schema. Even with this extensive schema, however, you might need to extend or customize the database schema for your particular business needs.
After you install and set up your programming environment, you can create your custom store and customize your storefront. You must ensure that the store server is properly configured, and that your store assets are moved to the Store server.
HCL Commerce uses Java Server Pages (JSP) to implement the view layer of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. The view layer is in charge of retrieving data from the database through the use of data beans and formatting it to meet the display requirements. The view layers determines whether the request is sent to a browser or streamed out as XML. JSP files present a clean separation between data content and presentation.
The Controller layer is the conductor of operations for a request. It controls the transaction scope and manages the session related information for the request. The controller first dispatches to a command and then calls the appropriate view processing logic to render the response.
The business logic layer is the business components that provide OAGIS services to return data or start business processes. The presentation layer uses these OAGIS services to display data, or to invoke a business process. The business logic provides data required by the presentation layer. The business logic layer exists because more than just fetching and updating data is required by an application; there is also additional business logic independent of the presentation layer.
The interaction between the business objects and persistence layer is isolated in an object called the Business Object Mediator. Business object document (BOD) commands interact with the Business Object Mediator to handle the interaction with the logical objects and how they are persisted.
A business model, a representation of the business processes used throughout the site, provides a sample commerce solution which includes an organization structure, default user roles and access control policies, one or more starter stores, administration tools, and business processes that demonstrate best practices. A business model can be customized to support business requirements and scenarios. HCL Commerce provides sample business models that show some common commerce solutions. These business models are created by setting up an organization hierarchy structure, access control policies, stores, and contracts that help satisfy the necessary business requirements.
Before starting to develop your site with HCL Commerce, you need to determine the business model supported by HCL Commerce that best represents the purpose of your site. Usually sites created with HCL Commerce will be implemented based on of one of these business models.
Store data is the information that is loaded into the Transaction server database, which allows your store to function. The URL Registry Entries and View Registry Entries packages are included in the diagram, but they are not database assets. These entries are presentation configuration (that is, struts actions and forwards) that must be deployed. URL registry entries are shown in the diagram to illustrate the entire store data information model. To operate properly, a store must have the data in place to support all customer activities. For example, in order for a customer to make a purchase, your store must contain a catalog of goods for sale (catalog data), the data associated with processing orders (tax and shipping data), and the inventory to fulfill the request (inventory and fulfillment data).
You can extend the HCL Commerce product to fit your business needs. This topic describes the prerequisite skills and required knowledge that you need to customize business logic. After you have the required knowledge, use HCL Commerce Developer to take tutorials that guide you step-by-step through various customization scenarios.
The Run Engine command framework provides predefined commands, that you can use to change environment parameters or container configurations. This framework is built into the HCL provided Docker images.
HCL Commerce uses Representational State Transfer (REST) services to provide a framework that can be used to develop RESTful applications on several platforms. These platforms can include web, mobile, kiosks, and social applications.
HCL Commerce Search uses a number of specialized terms. A concise list of the most commonly used terms is provided to get you started.
The product Search server runs in its own Linux-based container. The containers use Docker technology. All servers share workspaces in the Windows-based development environment, simplifying the development process. After you develop and test your code in the workspace, you can deploy it in new containers.
HCL Commerce Search includes several key services and interaction areas, including the search interface, programming model, and its interactions with other Commerce components.
HCL Commerce Search is configured using several files. These files contains properties that control certain search features, and can be extended to meet your business requirements.
Adding new fields into the index schema requires modifying the x-schema.xml file to add the new index field. Typically, an existing index is updated to add new fields (local index). In other instances, it is recommended to extend the product index by creating an index as an extension of an existing index (extension index).
The Search index is set up automatically during Search server startup. Search cores are created according to the configuration settings defined in the SRCHCONF and SRCHCONFEXT database tables. You can customize these tables to control the creation of search index cores.
The indexing process requires mapping data from an external source (database or file) to index fields to create index records or index documents. Depending on the complexity of the source data and index schema design, preprocessing the data might be required. Otherwise, indexing can be directly performed by using either the Data Import Handler (DIH) to index data from the database, or Solr APIs to index data from a file.
An expression provider implements custom business logic for modifying the main search expression before it is sent to the search engine. Each expression provider can be separately registered to any search profile query section so that it can be reused for other search operations. That is, a search profile defines a list of search providers that are used for assembling the main expression for a search request.
You can add native Solr query parameters to each search profile's query parameter section to enhance and customize the final Solr query.
You can disable certain expression providers and result filters in the HCL Commerce search configuration file (wc-search.xml). Doing so optimizes the storefront flow and improves the overall response time for certain types of HCL Commerce Search scenarios.
A query preprocessor modifies the native SolrQuery object right before it is sent to the Solr server for processing.
SolrQuery
A query postprocessor creates and modifies a search response immediately after the QueryResponse is returned from the Solr server.
QueryResponse
You can add custom index fields to be returned in REST responses by updating the wc-component.xml file.
HCL Commerce Search uses search profiles to control the storefront search experience at a page-level. Search profiles group search runtime parameters (search index name, search index fields, expression providers and result filters, paging and sorting), and search feature configurations (text highlight, facets, and spelling correction). Search profiles are defined in the HCL Commerce Search configuration file, wc-search.xml.
You must customize HCL Commerce Search when you are adding new indexed catalog entry properties to search rule actions or targets.
You can customize HCL Commerce Search in the storefront to suit your business needs. You can customize HCL Commerce Search according to your role within the WebSphere Commerce site.
You can use navigation rules to sort products in a category via a specific criterion such as price.
You can customize components of the final Solr query by using query parsers. A query parser is a component responsible for parsing the textual query and converting it into corresponding Lucene Query objects.
Search term associations are used to suggest more, different, or replacement products in search results. Search term associations can also link search terms to a selected landing page in the store. Business users create and manage search term associations in the Management Center by using the Catalogs tool.
The following limitations exist in HCL Commerce Search.
The search runtime, REST services, and search components are all customizable.
Search relevancy and merchandising is the process of controlling the search results that are returned to shoppers in the storefront, and the order in which they appear. There are several techniques that can be used to influence search relevancy, which lets you return products in the order that best suits your business needs.
HCL Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your HCL Commerce instance and stores.
Topics in the Samples category highlight the various samples that are provided with HCL Commerce.
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.
These topics describe the security features of HCL Commerce and how to configure these features.
Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce site performance.
Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with HCL Commerce, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.