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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.
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.
Dynamic caching
In general, caching improves response time and reduces system load. Caching techniques are used to improve the performance of World Wide Web Internet applications. Most techniques cache static content (content that rarely changes) such as graphic and text files. However, many websites serve dynamic content, containing personalized information or data that changes more frequently. Caching dynamic content requires more sophisticated caching techniques, such as those provided by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
Administering caching in HCL Commerce
An administrator using caching in HCL Commerce should be familiar with full page and fragment caching, Edge Side include, and using the dynamic API not to cache.

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 9.1, 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.
  - The HCL Commerce application
    Every time you deploy the HCL Commerce application, you are deploying a set of Docker containers that communicate with each other to run your HCL Commerce site. Each HCL Commerce application deployment can contain one or more stores.
  - Overview of administering an HCL Commerce site
    In HCL Commerce the person who performs administrative tasks is called a Site Administrator. The Site Administrator installs, configures, and maintains HCL Commerce and the associated software and hardware. The administrator responds to system warnings, alerts, and errors, and diagnoses and resolves system problems. Typically, this person controls access and authorization (creating and assigning members to the appropriate role), manages the Web site, monitors performance, and manages load balancing tasks. The Site Administrator might be responsible for establishing and maintaining several server configurations for different stages of development such as testing, staging, and production. The Site Administrator also handles critical system backups and resolves performance problems.
  - Staging environment
    an HCL Commerce staging environment is a runtime environment where business and technical users can update and manage store data and preview changes. The changes can then be propagated to the production environment.
  - Workspaces
    You can enable and manage workspace assets and determine policies such as locking rules and commit and publishing options.
  - HCL Commerce database
    As a site administrator, maintain the HCL Commerce database and ensure that any HCL Commerce utilities and processes that load and retrieve data from the database is configured to connect to the database properly.
  - Dynamic caching
    In general, caching improves response time and reduces system load. Caching techniques are used to improve the performance of World Wide Web Internet applications. Most techniques cache static content (content that rarely changes) such as graphic and text files. However, many websites serve dynamic content, containing personalized information or data that changes more frequently. Caching dynamic content requires more sophisticated caching techniques, such as those provided by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache, a built-in service for caching and serving dynamic content.
    - Preparing to use caching in HCL Commerce
      Before you use caching in HCL Commerce, ensure that you prepare. If there are major changes to your caching setup, repeat the preparation steps.
    - Administering caching in HCL Commerce
      An administrator using caching in HCL Commerce should be familiar with full page and fragment caching, Edge Side include, and using the dynamic API not to cache.
      - Full page and fragment caching
        The method by which the WebSphere Application Server caches JSP files is based on how the JSP is written. If the page output for a particular HCL Commerce command always produces the same result based on the URL parameters and request attributes, then this page output can be cached with the cache-entry using the property element, consume-subfragments (CSF) along with the HCL Commerce controller servlet (com.ibm.commerce.struts.ECActionServlet.class in Version 9.0.0.x or com.ibm.commerce.struts.v2.ECActionServlet.class in Version 9.0.1+ and if you are using Strut 2 configuration com.ibm.commerce.struts.v2.ECActionStrutsServlet.class) as the servlet name. When the cache-entry is defined in this manner, then the page output is cached in a manner known as full page caching. The big advantage of using consume-subfragments with the controller servlet is performance, but if there is personalized information on the page, such as a mini shopping cart, then full page caching with fragments can be used.
      - Edge caching
        Caching on the edge is a simple and effective way to improve the performance of your system. The WebSphere Application Server's dynacache has built-in functionality so that setting the EdgeCacheable property of a cache entry to true will allow it to be cached on the edge. This property takes care of the ESI for you, making edge caching easy with virtually no setup overhead.
      - Using dynamic API to not cache
        Occasionally, it is not appropriate to cache a page that matches a caching rule, or a fragment within the cached page. In this case, the Dynacache API makes it possible to ignore the cache rule and not cache the page or fragment in question.
      - Updating cache sizes
        You can independently configure the size of each cache that is used in HCL Commerce. The size of each cache is defined by its number of entries and by its size in megabytes (MB). The number of entries is a maximum size, not the current actual size, and the size in MB is the maximum memory footprint.
      - Enabling cache monitoring
        HCL Commerce provides a Dynamic Cache Monitor application for displaying cache statistics, edge side and disk statistics, cache entries, dependency IDs, and cache policy information. A Cache Monitor is an installable web application that provides a real-time view of the current state of dynamic cache.
    - Cache invalidation
      In order to maintain the relevance of cached data, based on time, user or other variables, the data will have to be invalidated or removed from the cache. Dynacache provides different methods for performing cache invalidation. There are four methods to invalidate the cache.
    - Dynamic caching considerations with JSTL
      HCL Commerce uses the Java Server Tag Library (JSTL) to create new JSP pages. If <% out.flush(); %> does not surround the <c:import> tag, using dynacache introduces strange behavior. The out.flush statement is required for all <c:import> statements, not just those for fragments. Even if the page is being cached using full-page caching, the out.flush tags are still required to surround the <c:import> tags.
    - Store relationships for cached store pages
      If your store is using data defined in another store through a store relationship, you must use the request attributes specified by the cache filter to define the relationships. The cache filter is a servlet filter that defines request attributes from the session and store relationship information that can be used by the WebSphere Application Server dynamic cache. The dynamic cache then uses this information to construct cache IDs and dependency IDs to be used for cache invalidation.
    - Improving marketing performance by using caching
      To improve marketing performance, use runtime caching to eliminate processing to and from the database.
    - Data recording: Improving runtime performance
      Two options are provided which can improve runtime performance regarding the recording of user behavior data.
    - Clearing the marketing Web service cache
      You can clear the Web service cache to ensure that the content displayed in an e-Marketing Spot is current and relevant.
    - Setting up command caching for catalog filter
      If your site uses catalog filters, you can set up command caching for catalog filter to help improve site performance.
    - Improving store function performance using caching
      To improve store function performance, use runtime caching to eliminate processing to and from the database.
    - Improving store performance through Commerce Composer JSP caching
      There are two types of JSP components within the Commerce Composer solution. Each can be cached for improved site performance.
    - Improving search engine optimization (SEO) performance using caching
      To improve SEO performance, use runtime caching to eliminate processing to and from the database.
    - Improving price rule performance using caching
      To improve price rule performance, you can tune your business object caching and set up dynamic cache invalidation for prices generated by price rules.
    - HCL Commerce data cache
      Enterprise version of HCL Commerce contain code to use the WebSphere Dynamic Cache facility to perform more caching of database query results. This additional caching code is referred to as the HCL Commerce data cache.
    - HCL Commerce Search caching
      HCL Commerce Search uses fragment caching in the storefront.
  - Extracting and loading data
    HCL Commerce provides utilities for preparing and loading data into a HCL Commerce database. The loading utilities are flexible and you can continue to use these utilities when you customize the HCL Commerce schema.
  - Payment plug-ins
    To configure a payment plug-in define payment and refund methods; payment and refund rules; and the payment protocols that you intend to use.
  - Search
    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 and the Elasticsearch search engine. The indexing pipeline is a more open, flexible and scalable and is tightly integrated with the data service. Using the underlying dataflow technology and architecture, you can easily customize the pipelines. This open-standards approach considerably eases the process of integrating Search with existing and third-party applications.
  - HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce
    HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce is a separately purchased product that provides a light-weight customer service solution that is embedded in the Aurora B2C and Aurora B2B storefronts. Even though this solution is a separately purchased product, it is not a separate application. Stores that are enabled with HCL Customer Service for HCL Commerce allow a customer service representative (CSR) to act on behalf of guest customers and registered customers. A CSR can manage customer accounts, cancel and reorder orders, and shop as customer. A CSR can also act on behalf of Buyer Administrators to help complete Aurora B2B tasks from the storefront, without having to access the Organization Administration Console.
  - HCL Commerce configuration file (wc-server.xml)
    Many aspects of the HCL Commerce runtime application are configured in an XML file. This XML file is located inside the HCL Commerce Java Platform, Enterprise Edition EAR.
  - Enabling the SSL Accelerator option
    An SSL Accelerator (or SSL Terminator) strips off HTTPS encryption at or before the Web server tier in a multitier setup. When you use an SSL Accelerator with HCL Commerce, you can use the SSL Accelerator option to configure HCL Commerce to correctly receive requests that require redirects.
  - Managing features
    You can administer the features for your store and site, such as attribute, catalog, promotion, marketing, order management features, and more. The administration tasks that you can complete differ depending on the type of feature and the tool that you use to administer your store and site.
  - Logging services
    HCL Commerce provides facilities for logging. For existing customers, ECTrace and ECMessage are still supported. For new implementations, use the WebSphere Application Server recommendation for logging and tracing.
  - Business auditing
    Business auditing is the capturing of the business logic and objects during a HCL Commerce operation. You may want to audit your business for various reasons: generic, such as to review various tasks performed weekly; or specific, such as to track the steps involved in a particular Customer Service Representative's order. A report on business auditing is available in the Administration Console.
  - Business events
    Each time that a command triggers a business event, a record is added to the BUSEVENT database table to persist data from the event. Event listeners and external systems (such as the Marketing component, a back end order management system, or an external analytics system) can use this data to perform further processing.
  - Business Object thresholds
    Applying limits on business operations reduces the risk of system attacks where unbound conditions might result in system failures.
  - Stores in HCL Commerce
    HCL Commerce supports several different types of entities that are defined as stores. The assets of these store entities may be edited using the HCL Commerce Accelerator.
  - Enabling registered users to access all stores in the Extended Sites business model
    HCL Commerce users can access storefronts by virtue of having the role of Registered Customer in the organization that owns the store, or in any organization above it. The roles a user has access to during registration are defined within the MemberRegistrationAttributes.xml file.
  - Hystrix on the Store server
    The Hystrix framework is used as a proxy for back-end resources such as the Transaction server and Search server by default. This can be disabled, but does have performance implications that must be considered.
- 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.
- 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.

Administering caching in HCL Commerce

An administrator using caching in HCL Commerce should be familiar with full page and fragment caching, Edge Side include, and using the dynamic API not to cache.

Note: In the development environment servlet caching is disabled. To enable and use servlet caching, see Enabling the dynamic cache service and servlet caching topics.