Tips from Sony Thomas

The comminucation between the Commerce box and the Search engine is through SOAP. Read  more about this architecture @  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2011/11/atg-search-architectural-flow-search.html The commerce instance forms the SOAP url just like the below code: private URL getSearchEngineURL(SearchEngine engine) {       SearchEnvironmentHost h =  engine.getSearchEnvironmentHost();       SearchMachine hi = h.getSearchMachine() ;       return new URL( "http://" + hi.getHostname() + ":" + engine.getPort() + "/AEXmlService/" );   } So the commerce instance need the hi.getHostname()  and engine.getPort() to form the url. It is obtained as below: 1. The component / atg/commerce/search/refinement/ CommerceFacetSearchService has the siteName defined, which will be pointing to the environment name defined in the Search Project. Read  more about this search project setup @  http://...

ATG Search configuration rules are specified through the ATG BCC Merchandising UI. Over here you could specify the below set of rules Redirection rules --> If you want to redirect to another page other than the search result page for a search keyword Property Prioritization rules  --> Prioritize certain set of properties and give weightage Result exclusion rules  --> Exclude certain search results Result positioning rules  --> Position / Sort the search result data 1.  To create the search configuration tree, you need to log-in to the ATG BCC Merchandising UI and select the Search Configuration Tree in the Browse tab drop down. Now need to click the Create button and first you need to create the Search Configuration Folder. 2.  When you create the folder, give the name of the folder and select whether the contents vary by Language or Segment. If your ecommerce site need to support more than one language and y...

If the search engine application is running in a separate box than the ATG CA-BCC deployed server, the search engine is invoked through a remoteLauncher running in these boxes. Means, a remoteLauncher needs to run in the host where SearchEngine is installed remotely to start the search engine. You could find the startRemoteLauncher.sh @ ATG/ATG2007.1/Search2007.1/SearchAdmin/bin/startRemoteLauncher.sh Start remoteLauncher using the command   ./startremotelauncher.sh –p <RMI Launcher service Port > & The Launcher Service Port on the host machine can be found in BCC @ Search Administration>Projects > Search Project: gmri_search_en_CA > Environments > Host Machine: > Advanced Settings. If the startRemoteLanucher reports a BindingException , then you need to find the process that is using the launchServicePort. For that run the netstat command like :   netstat -an |grep 10880 Then inorder to identify the process t...

You could read the Oracle Complete Commerce blog to get an idea about the latest Oracle updates regarding commerce including the ATG commerce @ https://blogs.oracle.com/commerce/ https://blogs.oracle.com/commerce/tags/atg Also checkout the ATG commerce Youtube channel @ http://www.youtube.com/atgcommerce Checkout the ATG commerce  Facebook link @ http://www.facebook.com/atgcommerce Another ATG user group @ Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/pages/ATG-Users-Group/105314702928610?sk=wall Check out the below Oracle blog to get the archived Oracle webcast and presentations @ https://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/

The rules that make up the search configurations are created in ATG Merchandising and stored as repository items in the RefinementRepository. When the product catalog is deployed from the ATG Merchandising environment to the target site, the RefinementRepository is deployed as well. For the soap call from the commerce instance to the search engine, for text queries we normally use refineConfig=”map” and the search engine itself determines the right refine config for the query. When Search Administration initiates indexing of the product catalog, it also invokes the /atg/commerce/search/config/ CatalogRankConfigAdapter component. This component is a customization adapter that manages the process of generating the search configuration files and submitting them to ATG Search. To generate the search configuration files, CatalogRankConfigAdapter invokes the /atg/search/repository/ SearchConfigurationXMLGenerator component (of class atg.repository.search.indexing.config.SearchConfigura...

Check out the Product Catalog  schema ER-Diagram @  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2012/01/atg-product-catalog-schema-er-diagram.html Check out the User Profile  schema ER-Diagram @ http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2012/03/atg-user-profile-schema-er-diagram.html If you would like to know the relationship between different Order schema tables, please find below screen shots of  Order schema ER Diagrams.

In this blog, I am going to list the best tuning settings for ATG Search engine. The AESoapConfig.xml, AESoapWaspConfig.xml  and AEConfig.xml are the xmls referred below and you can find it @  <ATG_DIR>\<Searchx.x>\SearchEngine\<operating_system>\bin\ folder. (1)  Make sure that the AESoapConfig.xml's rwTimeout is less than or equal to routing's readTimeoutMs. You could find the routing's readTimeoutMs @ atg\search\routing\SearchEngineService component.               rwTimeout is the  length of time in seconds to wait before a read or write operation times out on an active connection. The number can be decreased to improve performance. However, a value that is too low could cause slow connections to be prematurely closed. (2)  Adjust the number of engine threads to match the number of CPUs available to the engine. Note that the minimal value for maxThreads and maxSpar...

If you visit a web site with a secure connection(https) and if the website's security certificate has some problem like the security certificate presented by the website was not issued by a trusted certificate authority  or  the security certificate has expired or is not yet valid, you will get an error page ( like below in IE ) with an option to continue to this website. When this non secure page is loading, in Internet Explorer, you will get an option to specify whether you need to download the page content files like JS, CSS, Images,... But you will not get such an option in FireFox/Chrome and could see only the text data in this new non secure page. If you are doing some local development with FireFox/Chrome and have such a situation, you might want to override this security restriction. FireFox provides some exception url list in secure certificates menu. Go to Options - Advanced - Encryption - View Certificates and click the exception list and...

Other than the ProductCatalog repository, ATG search uses the SearchConfigurationRepository, SearchAdminRepository and RefinementRepository. Search Administration requires access to all these 3 repositories. The client application must have access to the routing repository.  Please find below the details of each repository.    1. SearchConfigurationRepository :               #  \atg\search\routing\repository\SearchConfigurationRepository.               #  It stores information about search engines, index structure and deployment information.               #  refers to all “ rout_* "  tables.    2. SearchAdminRepository :                #  \atg\searchadmin\SearchAdminRepository.               #  It stores information about search adminis...

A Facet is a search refinement element that corresponds to a property of a commerce item type. ATG supports the search result refinement using the Faceted Search concept. Read more about facted search @  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_search . Facet can either be ranges or specific values. Each facet is stored in the RefinementRepository as a separate refineElement repository item. Facets are divided into Global and Local facets. Global facets apply to all the categories and local facets only to the category in which they are created. For example Price/Brand can be considered as the facets that are common for all skus and New Release/Coming Soon can be considered as the facets that are specific to Physical Media products like Vidoe/DVD/Blue-ray/Books. We can use the ATG BCC - Merchandising UI to create facets. The Faceting Property depends on the meta-properties defined in the \atg\commerce\search\product-catalog-output-config.xml ( the def...

In this blog, I have listed some basic ATG Search troubleshooting tips in some general scenarios. 1. If the index did not deploy, consider the following possible causes : Is the DeployShare property configured @ /atg/search/routing/LaunchingService component ?  Is enough space available @ deployment share box for the index ?  Are the RMI ports configured correctly in the RoutingSystemService component ?  If the search engine application is running in a separate box, this application is invoked through a RemoteLauncher running in these boxes. Check whether these RemoteLaunchers are running in these boxes ? 2. If you have trouble in launching one or more search engines, try the following remedies: If the Search engine is standalone, set the /atg/search/routing/LaunchingService component’s engineDir property to the absolute path of the Search engine directory.  3. Search unavailable in the estore page, even when the SearchEngine is in "Running" st...

ATG products are packaged as a number of separate application modules. Application modules exist in the ATG installation as a set of directories defined by a manifest file. To create a new module, follow the below steps : Create a module directory within your ATG installation.  Create a META-INF directory within the module directory. Note that this directory must be named META-INF.  Create a manifest file named MANIFEST.MF and include it in the META-INF directory for the module. The manifest contains the meta-data describing the module. A module located at <ATG2007.1dir>/MyModule is named MyModule and a module located at <ATG2007.1dir>/CustomModules/MyModule is named CustomModules.MyModule. Within the subdirectory that holds the module, any number of files may reside in any desired order. These files are the module resources (EAR files for J2EE applications, WAR files for web applications, EJB-JAR files for Enterprise JavaBeans, JAR files of Java class...

ATG  Deprecated Code (till ATG 10) Technology Deprecated as of Notes ACC Reporting functionality ATG 2007.2, 9.2, 10.0.1 Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere JMS Providers ATG 10.0 This includes the WebLogic.JMSProvider and WebSphere.JMSProvider modules Support for CA deployment to prior versions ATG 10.0 CA will only support deployments to the same version Standard Commerce Catalogs ATG 10.0 Standard Catalogs are deprecated in favor of Custom Catalogs Pioneer Cycling Reference Application ATG 10.0 Replaced by Commerce Reference Store application Cache Switch Hot (cacheSwitchHot) ATG 10.0 .NET Client Software ATG 10.0 Facet Droplets ATG 9.0 The FacetSearchDroplet is deprecated in favor of  using the atg.search.formhandlers.QueryFormHandler to issue faceted search  queries. As of ATG 10.0, the FacetSearchDroplet will be removed entirely and any use of this droplet must be updated to use QueryFormHandler instead. Note that...