WebSphere Commerce Search Cookbook

Getting Search Rules to work with normal 'click' Category Navigation

Brendon_Baila Tags: commerce search rules solr 3 Comments 2,894 Visits

Out of the Box, Search rules only work when you type a search term into the storefront. If you are simply clicking around different categories/facets (called 'category navigation'), search rules will not trigger. We use sequencing/sorting only for category navigation, by default

You can use the below steps as an example to get search rules working for category navigation:

1) Modify the getCatalogNavigationView expressionProvider in the get-data-config.xml. Pass in a '*' into the _wcf.search.term parameter as follows:

The get-data-config.xml is in the directory:

<AppServer directory>/profiles/<profile name>/installedApps/WC_<profile>_cell/WC_<profile>.ear/Stores.war/WEB-INF/config/com.ibm.commerce.catalog-fep/get-data-config.xml

Passing in the '*' like this will make the searchTerm value default to '*', if no other value has been specified from the storefront.

(The screenshot is updating the getCatalogNavigationView, you might instead need to update getCatalogNavigationViewbyCategory, depending on which ExpressionBuilder you use)

2) Remove the '*' from the prohibited list of search terms in the wc-component.xml:

The wc-component.xml is in the directory:

<AppServer directory>/profiles/<profile name>/installedApps/WC_<profile>_cell/WC_<profile>.ear/xml/config/com.ibm.commerce.catalog-fep/wc-component.xml

3) Build your search rule, for example:

4) As shown in the above screenshot, make sure to make the keyword '*':

If implementing this customization, testing should be done on the storefront after to make sure the search rules is influencing the results as expected.

If you are in fep6, update the wc-component.xml under the xml\config\com.ibm.commerce.catalog-fep directory by commenting out the following line:

<_config:property name="IgnoreLeadingPatterns" value="[\\*\\?]+"/>

Modified by Brendon_Baila

Add a Comment

Edit

More Actions v

Quarantine this Entry

Comments (3)

1 Jeharul commented Permalink

Hi Brendon,

I am currently using FEP6. As per you the above details , I have removed "\\*" from the stoppatterns field and had also commented "<_config:property name="IgnoreLeadingPatterns" value="[\\*\\?]+"/>".

I could still see that my search rule is not getting triggered.

Any other reason ??

2 Brendon_Baila commented Permalink

which expression builder are you using? Did you update the correct one? Newer FEPs use getCatalogNavigationViewbyCategory expression builder for category navigation.

3 chetan_raju commented Permalink

Hi Brendon,

I am currently using FEP5 and FP6. I followed the steps to enable search rules for category navigation but it doesn't seem to work.

I updated the get-data-config.xml and added the param mentioned above for getCatalogNavigationView expression builder.

I also tried to add the parameter to getCatalogNavigationViewByCategory expression builder. I also noted that the expression-template for getCatalogNavigationViewByCategory does not have $searchTerm$ in it. Even after modifying the expression-template and adding _wcf.search.term='$searchTerm$', the result is that the search rules are not applied to the category navigations.

Any suggestions ?

Best regards,
Chet

Add a Comment Add a Comment

Feed for Blog Entries ▼ Feed for Blog Comments ▼ Feed for Comments for this Entry ▼