The Oracle ATG Web Commerce Search product allows end-users to search indexed data on a site and receive useful answers. Implementing Search on your site involves the following steps:
Specify repository items and properties to index through an XML definition file.
Based on the information in the XML definition file, transform these repository items into XHTML documents.
Index the XHTML documents in Search.
Use search form handlers to allow site visitors to search the indexed documents.
The first three steps are described in the ATG Search Administration Guide. This book explains how to set up search pages and form handlers to help your users achieve the search results they want from your site. For most sites, the content searched is a product catalog; therefore most of the examples in this book are geared toward this common situation, but you can adapt them for other purposes.
The Oracle ATG Web Commerce Search form handlers provide access to a wide number of options that can affect how searches are processed and search results are displayed. These options are ultimately passed to the search engine in XML form. In general, this book provides Java API-level information regarding these settings; however, at times it may be necessary to explore the XML level, since this is the language understood by the engine. In addition, an appendix reference on the XML is included to help in debugging search request and response strings.
This chapter includes the following sections:
