Level: Intermediate Martin Forest (mforest@ca.ibm.com), Software Developer, IBM
Chris Galloway (crg@ca.ibm.com), Information Developer, IBM
Jenny Chan (jenchan@ca.ibm.com), Software Quality Engineer, IBM
19 Nov 2008 This article describes how to enable the sales catalog
feature in the catalog asset store when using the extended sites model
in WebSphere® Commerce Version 6.0 Feature Pack 4.
Introduction
The IBM Management Center for WebSphere Commerce is a business user tool
for managing business tasks and assets for online businesses. Among the
wide range of functions that are supported by the Management Center is the
ability to create sales catalogs. The sales catalog is used to organize
and display assets from the master catalog. For example, you can create a
sales catalog to highlight new merchandise, seasonal merchandise such as a
summer or winter catalog, or a particular product line.
The extended sites business model allows sellers to create many sites to
target audiences in various business contexts, such as different
geographical regions or market segments. Extended sites can share the same
master catalog while having a completely different store front appearance.
By default, each extended site manages its own sales catalog when using
the IBM Management Center. This allows each extended site to display
assets differently while sharing the same catalog asset store. In this
scenario, each extended site has complete control of its own sales
catalog. However, in certain situations, it may be desirable to display
assets in the same way among the extended sites. By doing a few
customizations to the IBM Management Center code, you share
sales catalogs among the extended sites. This way, you can centrally
manage the sales catalog from the catalog asset store in the customized
Management Center. These customizations reduce redundancy and create
an efficient method to manage and reuse the sales catalog.
Figure 1. Moving sales
catalogs from the extended site to the catalog asset store
Enabling the sales
catalog in the extended sites model
To enable the sales catalog in the catalog assets store, you must
disable the sales catalog in all extended sites. The following instructions
explain how to do this task.
Before starting, ensure the following conditions are satisfied:
- Your sales catalogs belong to the catalog asset store, or you have
no sales catalogs associated to the catalog asset store.
- You have no sales catalogs associated to any of the extended
sites.
If the sales catalogs are associated with some of your
extended sites, then you need to remove these associations by deleting them
from the "STORECAT" table for the appropriate stores and sales catalogs.
You need to create a backup of these two files from the LOBTools project
before starting this customization:
/LOBTools/WebContent/WEB-INF/src/lzx/commerce/catalog/objectDefinitions/CatalogCommonObjectDefinitions.lzx/LOBTools/WebContent/WEB-INF/struts-extension.xml
Control of the sales catalog for a particular store type is handled by the
following classes:
-
catStoreTypeSalesCatalogObjectCreationRestriction
-
catStoreTypeSalesCatalogObjectFilterRestriction
The class
catStoreTypeSalesCatalogObjectCreationRestriction
is used to control the store types to create a sales catalog or
sales category.
The class
catStoreTypeSalesCatalogObjectFilterRestriction
is used to filter out the store types, which do not have sales catalog
categories and prevent them from appearing in the navigation pane.
These classes are stored in the file CatalogCommonObjectDefinitions.lzx in
the workspace of your developer environment.
The following instructions explain how to enable the sales catalog tool in
the catalog asset store and to disable it from the extended sites.
- Remove or comment out the following enablement condition from
both classes to enable the sales catalog from the asset store:
<wcfEnablementCondition conditionId="cpsCondition" contextName="storeType"
enablementValue="CPS"/>
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- Add the following enablement condition to both classes to disable
the sales catalogs in the extended sites (BMH is the store type for B2B
extended sites, MHS is the store type for B2C extended sites):
<wcfEnablementCondition conditionId="bmhCondition" contextName="storeType"
enablementValue="BMH"/>
<wcfEnablementCondition conditionId="mhsCondition" contextName="storeType"
enablementValue="MHS"/>
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- Review the "STORE" table to confirm that the extended sites store
types are BMH or MHS.
If a sales catalog that was previously created in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator fails to
show up in the Management Center, make sure that in the table "STORECAT",
the mastercatalog column is set to "0" for the respective catalog_id and
store_id.
Follow the remaining steps to ensure that the catalog drop-down list in
the advanced search only displays the sales catalogs that belong to the
store. To do this, create a new JSP.
- Create and save the new file FindCatalogs.jsp under the directory
LOBTools/WebContent/jsp/commerce/catalog. The content of the
FindCatalogs.jsp file looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c"%>
<%@ taglib uri="http://commerce.ibm.com/foundation" prefix="wcf"%>
<%-- Webservice to retrieve the master catalog --%>
<wcf:getData type="com.ibm.commerce.catalog.facade.datatypes.CatalogType"
var="catalog"
expressionBuilder="getMasterCatalog">
<wcf:contextData name="storeId" data="${param.storeId}"/>
</wcf:getData>
<%-- Webservice to retrieve the sales catalogs --%>
<wcf:getData type="com.ibm.commerce.catalog.facade.datatypes.CatalogType[]"
var="salesCatalogs"
expressionBuilder="getAllCatalogs">
<wcf:contextData name="storeId" data="${param.storeId}"/>
<wcf:param name="booleanValue" value="false"/>
<wcf:param name="dataLanguageIds" value="${param.defaultLanguageId}"/>
</wcf:getData>
<%-- Create the catalog objects. --%>
<objects>
<jsp:directive.include file="restricted/serialize/SerializeCatalog.jspf"/>
<c:forEach var="catalog" items="${salesCatalogs}">
<c:if test="${catalog.catalogIdentifier.externalIdentifier.storeIdentifier.uniqueID
== param.storeId }">
<jsp:directive.include file="restricted/serialize/SerializeCatalog.jspf"/>
</c:if>
</c:forEach>
</objects>
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- Open the file
/LOBTools/WebContent/WEB-INF/struts-extension.xml.
- Add and save the following action in the <actionMappings
/> section of struts-extension.xml:
<action path="/FindCatalogs" forward="/jsp/commerce/catalog/FindCatalogs.jsp" />
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The customization is now complete. Redeploy the project LOBTools to your
target server environment. You can now see the sales catalog
option in the filter of the navigation pane when you are in the catalog
asset store. You can also create, update, and delete the sales catalogs
in the catalog asset store.
Conclusion
This article described how to enable the sales catalog feature
in the catalog asset store and how to disable them in the extended stores.
This customization allows your organization to manage your sales catalog
efficiently if your organization shares identical sales catalogs across
multiple extended sites.
Resources
About the authors  | 
| | Martin Forest is a Software Developer for WebSphere Commerce at the IBM Toronto Lab, Canada. He designs and develops the Catalog Management user interface for the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator and the IBM Management Center. |
| 
| | Chris Galloway is an Information Developer for WebSphere
Commerce at the IBM Toronto Lab, Canada. |
| 
| | Jenny Chan is a Software Quality Engineer for WebSphere
Commerce at the IBM Toronto Lab, Canada. |
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