Tips from Sony Thomas

          Activity source is the property which controls the links on the left nav on the BCC home screen. All activity sources are registered with the ActivityManager component at /atg/bizui/activity/ActivityManager . When rendering the BCC home page, the ActivityManager cycles through all the registered ActivitySource components and displays left navigation links for each of them on the BCC home page. For example if I want to add a new link "My New Link" , below screen shots exaplins how this can be done 1. Add  activityManager.properties to specify the activityresources. In this  activityManager, I specified one MyActivitySource. 2. Add  MyActivitySource.properties  to specify the name of the link and the other details . Here it refers to a bundle properties file.  3. Add  the bundle properties file  to specify the name of the link.  4. Now you could see the new link...

 When the estore or commerce instances are restarted the routing system service can send shut down requests to stale engines, this can be caused because of any of the following. 1. Some other instance marked the engine as stopped in the DB (This can be caused because the machine could not reach the host running the engine) 2. The eStore instance is using a different search schema that has data about the search engine host and is marked as stopped in that DB. To avoid this overrride \atg\search\routing\RoutingSystemService.properties by setting cleanUpStrayEng=false.

Following are the different options in JBoss to take the thread dump. 1. Using JBoss jmx-console :    Got to http://localhost:8080/jmx-console  and search for the mbean " serverInfo " and click on that link. Click the  invoke mbean operation under listThreaddump() method. This will give you the current snapshot of threads which are running in your JBoss jvm. 2. By using twiddle :   In the commnad promt go to <JBOSS-HOME>/bin and run the command  twiddle.bat invoke "jboss.system:type=ServerInfo" listThreadDump > threadDump.html  and you could find the threadDump.html with the JBoss thread dump. 3. Using "Interrupt" signal :  Use kill -3 <process-id> to generate thread dump. You will find the thread dumps in server logs.

Read more about the basic design decisions for a commerce search setup @  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2012/03/basic-design-decisions-for-commerce.html Read more about search engine tuning @  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2012/02/atg-search-search-engine-tuning.html Following items will affect search performance:  number of items to be searched, quantity of content for each item, number of meta tags, number of facets, Search Merchandising settings, constraints, number of returned results,... You could find a detailed analysis below : 1. Decide how many search engines you need :   Based on the performance requirement of the ecommerce site, create the Search Project @ BCC - Search Admin and add the search engine hosts. Read more about search project creation and search engine host set up @   http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.com/2012/01/atg-search-how-to-create-search-project.html . 2. Decide the search indexing properties :   Search i...

Cross-site scripting attacks take advantage of a vulnerability that enables a malicious site to use your browser to submit form requests to another site. In order to protect forms from cross-site attacks in ATG, you can enable form submissions to automatically supply the request parameter _dynSessConf , which identifies the current session through a randomly generated long number. On submission of a form (using dsp:form tag) or activation of a property setting (using dsp:a tag), the request-handling pipeline ( DAFDropletEventServlet ) validates _dynSessConf  against its session confirmation identifier. If it detects a mismatch or missing number, it can block form processing and return an error. To disable this functionality, we could give the following properties (@ /atg/dynamo/Configuration to disable it globally) enforceSessionConfirmation  = false -->  specifies whether the request-handling pipeline requires session confirmation in order to proc...

In this blog I would like to explain the basic set of configuration/design decisions needed to setup an ATG search project. Most of these design decisions are common for all Enterprise search applications. 1. Decide the searchable properties :   This means the properties that the business want the user to search in the ecommerce platform. In ATG search these are configured as the text properties in the product-catalog-output-config.xml ( the definitionFile of the \atg\commerce\search\ProductCatalogOutputConfig). Usually the displayName of product/sku, displayName of department/category/sub-category, skuId, brandName are the properties configured as searchable. 2. Decide the search refinement properties or the faceted properties :   After a user search for a keyword, search refinement is the next step done to filter his results. ATG supports the search refinement using the Faceted Search concept. Read more about facted search @...

This blog is for the ATG beginners to get some basic overview about ATG. I just given the ATG concepts as a list of numbered points for the ease of understanding. 1. At the framework level, ATG is a               java based application platform for hosting web-based applications, as well as RMI accessible business components,               with an ORM layer,               a component container,               an MVC framework,               and a set of tag libraries for JSP. 2. Art Technology Group(ATG)'s Dynamo Application Server (DAS) is a Java EE compliant application server. DAS is no longer actively developed as ATG recommends using other Java EE applications servers for its products such as BEA WebLogic, JBoss or IBM WebSphere. 3. Prior to ATG 2007, JHTML was used instead of JSP for view purpose. J...

Read more about the search indexing behind the scene steps @  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2011/12/atg-search-indexing-behind-scene-steps.html ATG Search prepares searchable content by indexing the products specified in the XML definition file (/atg/commerce/search/ProductCatalogOutputConfig). Generally there are two types of indexing 1.  Full Indexing  --> all data taken for indexing 2.  Incremental Indexing --> only changed data will be taken for indexing When full indexing is triggered, following happens:    1. The out of box component BulkLoader will call IndexedItemsGroup.getGroupMembers() to load the products to the XHTL document. It prevents uncategorized products from getting indexed. The definition file format begins with a top-level item as a product and includes the properties of parent category and childskus. For each product, the set of Variant Producers configured in ProductCatalogOutputConfig is execute...

When someone asks how to simulate a back button, they really mean to ask how to create a link that points to the previously visited page. Most browsers tend to keep a list of which websites the user has visited and in what order they have done so. The DOM window object provides access to the browser's history through the history object. Moving backward and forward through the user's history is done using the   back(), forward(), and go() methods of the  history  object. To move backward through history, just do window.history.back() ; This will act exactly like the user clicked on the Back button in their browser toolbar. Find below a sample html code: <html> <head> <script type="text/javascript"> function goBack(){  window.history.back() } </script> </head> <body>    <input type="button" value="Back" onclick="goBack()" /> </body> </html>

Check out the Product Catalog  schema ER-Diagram @  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2012/01/atg-product-catalog-schema-er-diagram.html Check out the O rder schema ER-Diagram @   http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2012/02/atg-order-schema-er-diagram.html If you would like to know the relationship between different User Profile schema tables, please find below screen shot of  Profile schema ER Diagrams.