Level: Intermediate Marco Deluca (madeluca@ca.ibm.com), Solution Architect, IBM
04 Nov 2009 This tutorial explains how to preview
content as if you were in one or more customer segments. Using the WebSphere®
Commerce Management Center, you can select a customer
segment and preview your Web store in that context. This tutorial also
demonstrates how to add custom preview parameters in WebSphere Commerce V7.
Before you start
This tutorial demonstrates a quick example of extending the
WebSphere Commerce V7 preview capability to add additional preview
options, thus allowing business users to preview their
Web store in the context of various shoppers. It showcases
customizing the WebSphere Commerce Management Center
interface to display new preview options. Next, it describes
how to extend the preview business context to hold additional preview
parameters. Finally, it shows how to customize the marketing
subsystem to evaluate if the shopper browsing the Web store is
previewing the store in a specific customer segment.
Extrapolating from this exercise, you can add new
preview options to enable preview in the context of other attributes.
For example, if you choose to preview in the context of a specific
Sales Catalog, you can build functionality to right-click the Sales
Catalog entity and preview it in the context of that particular catalog.
Objectives
Learn how to:
- Customize the Management Center to add new preview options.
- Extend the WebSphere Commerce framework to
process and store the custom preview properties.
- Enable business users to preview in the context
of a customer segment.
Figure 1 demonstrates how a business user can
select a customer segment and preview in that context. Right-clicking
a customer segment results in a context menu displaying the new
Preview In Segment option.
Figure 1. New Preview
In Segment option
Prerequisites
This tutorial is for WebSphere Commerce V7 developers with Java™
and XML familiarity. You should be familiar with the WebSphere
Commerce model-view-controller extensions model and the Management
Center framework before customizing the Management Center. Experience using
IBM® Rational® Application Developer is also recommended.
System requirements
Before beginning this tutorial, ensure that:
- You are using WebSphere Commerce Version 7. Previous versions
are not described in this article.
- You are using the WebSphere Commerce development
environment.
- You have a starter store published.
Duration
This tutorial takes about one and a half hours to complete.
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