Introduction to the Product Catalog - Updated January 07, 2001


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Introduction to the Product Catalog

Internet-savvy consumers today have high expectations about their online shopping experience. They love the convenience of finding just about any product item for sale on the Web. They expect that an e-commerce Web site's pages will load quickly in their browser, and do not care if there happen to be a thousand other concurrent users accessing the site's servers. They want to be able to pay for the items securely with their credit card, and have the items delivered directly to their home or business.

In the Web application development industry, we are all familiar with the model for an e-commerce Web site. One goal is to attract consumers who might have purchased items in a retail store, and instead get them to buy the items online, on your Web site. The companies that want to exploit the Web more effectively include:

Already established companies with a solid market presence that pre-dates the Internet revolution. These companies are extending their marketing and sales reach by enabling existing and new customers to buy items on their e-commerce Web sites. They are moving from "bricks and mortar" to "bricks and clicks."
New online-only companies that have established their store front on the Internet.

Both types of companies are attempting to succeed in a highly competitive environment. Some already have the trained programming staff with the expertise in the J2EE APIs to create from scratch the Enterprise Java Beans and JavaServer Pages (JSPs) that will support the Web site's computing model. Many firms, however, need to get a jump on their competition as they work to go live with their e-commerce Web site as soon as possible. They cannot afford to wait six months or a year to develop the standardized database resources, EJB programming expertise, and JSP templates that together will provide the commonly expected Web site functions shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1 Simple View of E-commerce Web Site Functions

Of course, writing the code to create, build, deploy, and maintain all the processing shown in Figure 1-1 would require a lot of time and effort. In addition to the front-end presentation layer that you see in the previous diagram, high-volume Web sites also require an underlying software infrastructure that makes it possible to support peak usage of their commerce site by eager consumers.

So how can a company get a jump on the competition and implement a scalable e-commerce Web site? The answer is: by using the pre-built features that come with BEA WebLogic Commerce Server!

What Does the Product Catalog Provide?

The WebLogic Commerce Server product catalog provides the following features:

A well-designed database schema and build scripts that define the commonly used product items and attributes found on Web-based catalog sites. The metadata for the product catalog is based on the Dublin Core Open Standard. In the current release, schemas are provided for Oracle® and Cloudscape® databases.
The schema establishes a CATEGORY_ID field as the unique, primary key of the category metadata, which uses the WLCS_CATEGORY database table. The schema also establishes the SKU field (an acronym for "Stock Keeping Unit") as the unique, primary key of the product item metadata, which uses the WLCS_PRODUCT database table.

The schema is described in The Product Catalog Schema, of this document.
A bulk loader program called DBLoader that takes a data input file and populates the product catalog database. With DBLoader, you can add large volumes of product item and category records in a single command. Adding the records is done by specifying the -insert option on the DBLoader command line, and is probably the option you will use most often. However, you can also use the -update or -delete option with DBLoader.
The DBLoader program and third-party data loader utilities are described in Using the Product Catalog Database Loader, of this document.
Browser-based administration screens that you can use to manage the product catalog's content and behavior. The screens allow you to find, add, edit, or remove product categories or items. Figure 1-2 shows a portion of a sample administration screen, where the administrator is editing the values for an existing item.
Figure 1-2 Sample Administration Screen

In addition to finding, adding, editing, and deleting product items and categories, you can also use the administration screens to tune the performance of your product catalog. You can adjust the in-memory cache of items and categories, a feature that can significantly improve the satisfaction level of customers shopping on your Web site.

Web site administrators should read Catalog Administration Tasks, in this document.
JavaServer Page (JSP) templates that you can use as a starting point for your e-commerce Web development, and easily customize. You can change the presentation of each page to match your corporate branding requirements, design preferences, navigation options, and the content of your catalog. The JSP templates use a combination of HTML code, Java scriplets, and JSP tags to provide the presentation layer of your Web-based product catalog.
For example, Figure 1-3 shows the running output of a sample browse.JSP file provided by WebLogic Commerce Server.

Figure 1-3 Running Output of a Sample JSP Template

For details about the JSPs used with the product catalog, see The Product Catalog JSP Templates and Tag Library, in this document. For related details about the JSPs used with order processing (shopping cart, shipping, tax, checkout, and so on), see BEA WebLogic Commerce Server Order Processing Package. For related details about the JSPs used to register users, see BEA WebLogic Commerce Server Registration and User Processing Package in the online documentation.
Behind the scenes, an Application Programming Interface (API) of pre-built Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) and other Commerce Server features that provide the computing infrastructure and scalability that enables your site to support many concurrent users.
Using the API to Extend the Product Catalog, describes the various options available for extending, customizing, or writing third-party integrations for the WebLogic Commerce Server product catalog. The API is also described in the WebLogic Commerce Server online Javadoc for the com.beasys.commerce.ebusiness.catalog.* packages.
Flexible internationalization support that allows you to choose among many architectural options when developing multilingual product catalogs. These features will help you internationalize your system and render a localized version of each category or item on a Web page, including text descriptions, images, item cost, type of currency, and so on.
Product Catalog Internationalization Support, describes how you can internationalize your product catalogs in more detail.

Catalog Hierarchy

Categories in the product catalog exist in a hierarchy, as illustrated in Figure 1-4.

The example shown in the figure deviates from the sample data that is seen when you run the WebLogic Commerce Server templates. However, the following example illustrates a point about how items can reside in more than one category.

Figure 1-4 Sample Product Catalog Hierarchy

Note that any given category needs to be aware of the following:

Items in this category.
The parent category. If the category is already a top-level category in the hierarchy, then the parent category is the catalog's root category.
Sibling categories that exist at the same level as the current category.

Also note that an individual item can reside in more than one category. For example, a hardcopy book about the works of paleoanthropologist Dr. Richard Leaky in Kenya might reside in a Books --> Bibliographies category and also in a subcategory of Books --> Science --> Paleoanthropology.

If you delete the instance of an item in one category, it continues to reside in any other categories in which it might exist. Also, if you delete all the categories that an item belongs to, the item is moved to a separate, "uncategorized items" category in the catalog. Sometimes these uncategorized items are referred to as "orphaned items."

Unlike items, categories cannot reside outside of their hierarchical path. In other words, a category that resides in one path of the hierarchy cannot also reside in another path of the hierarchy.

Product Catalog Development Roles

Given the goal of building a Web-based product catalog, what are the roles of the people on the development team? The product catalog development would most likely be done by a team of people in your organization who collaborate to deliver an e-commerce Web solution. While the roles that are summarized in the following list describe the types of tasks involved in building the site, it is recognized that people often have job assignments that span multiple roles.

Web content developers use the JavaServer Page (JSP) templates and add customized HTML tags to match your corporate branding requirements, design preferences, navigation options, and the content of your catalog.
JSP developers and Java programmers handle any customization of the JavaServer Pages and might use the JSP tags provided by WebLogic Commerce Server (or custom tags) to extend the functionality provided on the pages. Java programmers might also modify or add scriplets on the pages. Business analysts bring their market research to the design table and help the developers understand the required product items, categories, and pricing. The business analysts usually are not involved in the page design or customization steps that others on the team manage.
System or Web administrators maintain the data in the catalog, either adding, editing, or removing categories and items from the catalog. Administrators also optimize the performance of the catalog by adjusting settings for the in-memory cache of categories and items in the catalog.

How Are the Product Catalog Features and Other Commerce Features Linked?

The WebLogic Commerce Server product catalog is only a portion of the features provided in this release. Related features, of course, are implemented by the order processing and user registration packages. When a user of your Web site decides to click the Add to Cart button (or equivalent) on one of the catalog pages, by default the user is directed to the shopping cart portion of the order processing package.

Once the user clicks Add to Cart, a series of JavaServer Pages under the control of background processing are employed to step the user through the process of entering the information required to complete the order.

You can modify the actual sequence of pages, or Webflow, by editing a configuration file called webflow.properties. A default Webflow file is provided by WebLogic Commerce Server. The advantage here is that the flow of the website (that is, what page to go to next) is not hardwired into each page, but is managed by an external flow manager. Rather than having to edit HTML and JSP files to change the page sequence, the administrator simply modifies webflow.properties. Also, you do not have to restart the WebLogic Server instance in which your WebLogic Commerce Server applications is running, allowing for dynamic site management.

Underlying all this processing for both catalog management and order management is another important feature called the WebLogic Commerce Server pipeline. The pipeline is a mechanism for binding together a sequence of services into a single named service. While the JavaServer Pages and tags manage the presentation layer of the catalog and order fulfillment site, the pipeline manages the processing of the business data. A pipeline configuration file, pipeline.properties, contains properties that describe the execution of a series of business methods.

By modifying the pipeline.properties file, it is easy to change a business process (such as checking an order status) by adding or removing steps in the pipeline configuration, without any programming.

Figure 1-5 shows the link between the product catalog processing and the order processing package. The diagram illustrates conceptually the Webflow (arrows) and the pipeline that is processing the business data. For instance, it is the pipeline that passes the data about the item(s) the consumer has selected for purchase to the Order Fulfillment services that will process the order.

Figure 1-5 Link Between Catalog and Order Fulfillment

For details about configuring the site's Webflow and pipelines, see BEA WebLogic Commerce Server Webflow and Pipeline Management. For details about the order processing, see BEA WebLogic Commerce Server Order Processing Package. For details about user registration, see BEA WebLogic Commerce Server Registration and User Processing Package.

Using Commerce Server and Personalization Server Features in an Application

You can use WebLogic Commerce Server and WebLogic Personalization Server features in an application. For example, you may want to have a portal as the entry point for your users, but you wish to build e-commerce functionality into your application. For more information, please see the topic "Using the Catalog Application in a Portal" in the online documentation.

Next Step

We suggest you read The Product Catalog Schema, which explains the structure of the product catalog's tables in the Commerce database. Understanding the product catalog schema is essential to moving your existing data into the database, or adding new data to the catalog.