Configuring Visual Merchandising to automatically insert item identifiers in a page does not guarantee that HTML pages will get marked up the way you intend. Depending on how a page is coded, Visual Merchandising may not be able to determine where an asset begins and ends. For example, it might mark a product link as a category link if a category property was the last thing a Merchandising user accessed during the preview session. Then, when the user right-clicks the product link and selects Edit from the Visual Merchandising pop-up menu, the last-accessed category appears for editing instead of the product. This happens because the RepositoryPropertySensor fired an event when the category property was accessed.

Explicitly tagging JSP pages allows you to precisely control where item identifiers are inserted in a page, ensuring that Merchandising users can access the assets they intend to in Layout mode. This section describes how to use the custom <preview:repositoryItem tag> to explicitly tag pages.