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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.
Customizing
The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
Presentation layer
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.
HCL Commerce JSP programming best practices
This section offers the following selection of JSP programming best practices, which promote development of reusable and easily maintainable JSP pages within the HCL Commerce store development framework:
Use the escapeXml attribute to preserve HTML formatting
By default, the value of the escapeXml attribute of the JSTL <c:out> tag is true. This default behavior ensures that HTML special characters, such as <, >, &, ', or ", contained in output strings are converted into their corresponding character entity codes and displayed properly in the HTML page produced by the JSP page. In some common HCL Commerce store scenarios, however, this behavior is counterproductive. One such scenario is the display of prices in globalized stores:

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.
- Customizing
  The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
  - Customizing Management Center for HCL Commerce
    HCL Commerce allows you to pull the GIT bundle of Management Center source code and start the application locally to customize the Management Center.
  - Managed asset deployment
    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.
  - HCL Commerce development environment
    HCL Commerce Developer is the development toolkit for customizing a HCL Commerce application.
  - Functional architecture
    Functional architecture provides both the set of patterns used to implement the business functionality and the frameworks in which these business functions execute.
  - Persistent object model
    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.
  - Creating your custom store
    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.
  - Presentation layer
    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.
    - HCL Commerce Struts framework
      Struts is a well documented, mature and popular framework for building front ends to Java applications. To address concerns in software applications, it uses a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture: The Model represents the business or database code, the View represents the page design code, and the Controller represents the navigational code.
    - Spring framework
      The Spring Framework is a lightweight, open source programming and configuration model for developing Java based enterprise applications. This framework is used in HCL Commerce for building and configuring Management Center, including the managing of URL requests from Management Center to retrieve and process object data.
    - Management Center
      The Management Center for HCL Commerce framework is the foundation for HCL Commerce business user tooling. The business objects that are managed with Management Center are defined by the individual components that make up Management Center. The Management Center framework uses these definitions to provide the features that you can use to find, create, modify, and delete the defined business objects. If you plan to customize the Management Center, ensure that you understand the framework and all of the components that make up Management Center.
    - Developing Commerce Composer assets
      Enrich the capabilities of the Commerce Composer tool by developing your own widgets and templates, and extending other features and functions to suit your business needs.
    - Customizing promotions
      Customizing promotions can involve the customization of the promotion business user tools and the underlying promotion engine, which features a clean architecture supporting rich functionality, as well as a wide array of customization possibilities.
    - Working with the promotions component configuration file
      Some Management Center components, like the promotions component, have customizable configuration files. These files contain properties that control certain component features.
    - Customizing marketing
      You can customize marketing features and objects to better meet the business needs of your site. For example, you can customize e-Marketing Spots, customer segments, activities, activity components, such as triggers, targets and actions, and more. Customization is supported for the Marketing tool in Management Center and for the storefront to display e-Marketing Spots.
    - Customizing price rules
      You can customize price rules to suit the business needs of your site. For example, you can create a new condition or action for business users to add to price rules. Customization is supported for both the Price Rule Builder tool user interface in the Catalog Filter and Pricing tool, and for the pricing services.
    - Customizing store preview
      You can customize store preview to add enhancements that help business users work more efficiently. These enhancements include the click-to-edit function and in-context preview function.
    - Customizing content versioning
      The content versioning feature is enabled for some objects in the Catalogs tool in Management Center. You can add or remove content versioning support for existing objects and custom objects by customizing both Management Center and HCL Commerce server.
    - Customizing the infrastructure component
      Customizing the infrastructure component provides you the ability to change configurable properties for Management Center and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) functionality.
    - Developing JSP pages
      To create JSP pages for HCL Commerce, you should have Rational Application Developer skills and JSP skills. You should also be familiar with JSTL.
    - HCL Commerce JSP programming best practices
      This section offers the following selection of JSP programming best practices, which promote development of reusable and easily maintainable JSP pages within the HCL Commerce store development framework:
      - Use JSTL in place of Java code
        JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) is a collection of JSP tags that provide standard functionality most commonly sought by JSP page authors. JSTL has support for conditions, iteration, locale-sensitive formatting, and so forth. It also has an expression language (EL) that allows page authors to control how data is retrieved and displayed.
      - Use the Commerce-specific tag for bean activation
        HCL Commerce data beans require activation prior to their use. HCL Commerce provides a Commerce-specific version of the useBean tag, <wcbase:useBean>, that performs data bean activation in Java-free manner and is the recommended method of data bean activation in store JSP pages.
      - Use Commerce-specific maps to access request parameters
        HCL Commerce provides the following Commerce-specific versions of the implicit JSP objects param and paramValues to facilitate access to decrypted HTTP request parameters:
      - Use the StoreErrorDataBean data bean for error handling
        To display store-specific error messages in JSP pages, use the StoreErrorDataBean data bean.
      - Use an appropriate inclusion mechanism
        JSP supports two inclusion mechanisms: Static include and Dynamic include.
      - Use the .jspf extension for JSP segments
        A JSP page can consist of one or more files: for example, the file containing a top-level JSP page, several files containing dynamically included JSP pages, and several files containing statically included JSP segments. Unlike the top-level or dynamically included pages, JSP segments need not be legal JSP pages and thus may not compile properly.
      - Use the escapeXml attribute to preserve HTML formatting
        By default, the value of the escapeXml attribute of the JSTL <c:out> tag is true. This default behavior ensures that HTML special characters, such as <, >, &, ', or ", contained in output strings are converted into their corresponding character entity codes and displayed properly in the HTML page produced by the JSP page. In some common HCL Commerce store scenarios, however, this behavior is counterproductive. One such scenario is the display of prices in globalized stores:
      - Ensure XHTML-compliance
        JSTL and HTML elements of your JSP pages should conform to the W3C XHTML standard and recommendations.
      - Use the post method for form submission
        Data can be sent from client to server by way of an HTML form using either the get or the post method. Servlets can handle either method properly by appropriately parsing and decoding the incoming request. In general, use of the post method is recommended due to the following reasons:
      - Changing the appearance of a starter store
        The storefront appearance is an important factor in improving customer experience. In this tutorial, the cascading style sheets (CSS) are modified to change the color and layout of the storefront. The new style is then made available as a display option for a starter store. The new style is selected in the Change Style wizard in HCL Commerce Accelerator or in the Management Center Store Management tool.
      - Enabling the Struts 2 file upload feature
        You can take full advantage of the HCL Commerce Struts 2 file upload feature. In order to use Struts 2 uploads, ensure that you have enabled the capability.
      - JSP pages and data beans
        A data bean is a Java bean that is used within a JSP page to provide dynamic content. A data bean normally provides a simple representation of an HCL Commerce entity bean. The data bean encapsulates properties that can be retrieved from or set within the entity bean. As such, the data bean simplifies the task of incorporating dynamic data into JSP pages.
      - HCL Commerce useBean tag
        The useBean tag instantiates an HCL Commerce data bean and automatically populates it for you. A new programming direction has also been undertaken with our starter stores that now use the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) to perform view logic, instead of Java code. At the same time, business logic has been moving into data beans. The combination of these steps allows for less Java code in a JSP page.
    - Double-click handling in HCL Commerce
      The purpose of double-click handling in HCL Commerce is to prevent processing the same request twice to ensure data integrity within the system. When processing certain URL requests, such as OrderItemAdd, the double-click feature of HCL Commerce will identify whether the request from the online shopper is currently being processed and blocks the current request if that is the case.
  - Controller layer
    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.
  - Business logic layer
    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.
  - Persistence 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.
  - Business model information model
    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.
  - Business models
    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 information model
    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).
  - Customizing HCL Commerce
    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.
  - Run Engine command framework
    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.
  - GraphQL for HCL Commerce
    The GraphQL markup language is available for any API. It is a server-side interpreter for processing queries using a data type system you design. With GraphQL, your data and code are independent of any database or storage system.
  - Representational State Transfer (REST) services
    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.
  - Web services
  - Search
    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. Starting with Version 9.1, HCL Commerce Search with Elasticsearch microservices manage indexing and other crucial tasks, with no performance impact on the storefront or transaction server.
- 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.

JSP programming best practice: Use the escapeXml attribute to preserve HTML formatting

By default, the value of the escapeXml attribute of the JSTL <c:out> tag is true. This default behavior ensures that HTML special characters, such as <, >, &, ', or ", contained in output strings are converted into their corresponding character entity codes and displayed properly in the HTML page produced by the JSP page. In some common HCL Commerce store scenarios, however, this behavior is counterproductive. One such scenario is the display of prices in globalized stores:

Important: Only set the escapeXML attribute to false when you are accessing internal parameters, not parameters or attributes that are specified on the URL. Pages are susceptible to XSS attack when using unescaped URL parameters.


<c:out value="${product.listPrice}" />

As the Japanese yen symbol, yen , is displayed using the ¥ named character entity, the default conversion will result in the price of yen 3,544 being displayed as ¥3,544.

To prevent the conversion, escapeXml should be explicitly set to false as follows:


<c:out value="${product.listPrice}" escapeXml="false" />

Another common scenario is the display of user-supplied text, such as product descriptions or dynamic text messages. If you expect advanced users to use HTML tags for formatting, such as line breaks or bulleted lists, set the escapeXml attribute of the <c:out> tag used to display the text to false as in the following example:


<c:out value="${productPromotion.longDescriptionString}"
escapeXml="false" />