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ATG Search - high level overview of product-catalog-output-config.xml and XHTMLs

  • The definition file format begins with a top-level item element that specifies the repository and item descriptor to use, and then lists the properties of that item type to include.
  • The top-level item element has the is-document attribute set to true. This attribute specifies that an XHTML document should be generated for each item of that type (in this case, each user item).
  • Property values that come from standard JavaBean properties of the RepositoryItem object (rather than dynamic bean properties) are specified using a dollar-sign ($) prefix.
  • The item element has an is-multi attribute for specifying multi-value properties. If a property is an Array, Collection or Map  you should set this attribute to true.
  • Eeach ATG Search document is uniquely identified by a URL (typically the path name of the file on the file system).
  • In the XHTML documents that the ATG platform generates from repository items, meta properties are represented by meta tags in the head of the document, while text properties are represented by div tags in the body of the document.
  • ATG uses a URL of the following form to uniquely identify each document:       atgrep:/repository-name/item-descriptor-name/repository-id
  • In addition to the properties you specify in the definition file, the output document also includes certain properties that provide sufficient information to identify the repository items represented in the document. The output for each item automatically includes the properties $repositoryId, $repository.repositoryName, and $itemDescriptor.itemDescriptorName.
  • The output for the document-level item also includes a $url property and a $baseUrl property, where each contain the URL representing this repository item. (The difference between these properties is that if a VariantProducer( Eg: locale specific) is used to generate multiple documents from the same repository item, the $url property for each document will include unique query arguments to distinguish the document from the others.)
  • At a minimum, you need to set the following properties on each IndexingOutputConfig component: bulkLoader , definitionFile.
  • The IncrementalLoader component uses an implementation of the PropertiesChangedListener interface to monitor the repository for add, update, and delete events. It then analyzes these events to determine which ones necessitate updating XHTML documents and creates a queue of the affected repository items. When a new incremental update is triggered, the IncrementalLoader processes the items in the queue, generating and loading a new XHTML document for each changed repository item.
  • PropertyAccessor defines how the document loaders obtain property values
  • VariantProducer specifies logic for creating multiple XHTML documents from the same repository item.
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