As explained in the Managing User Profiles chapter of this guide, an ATG product environment can contain three kinds of user profiles:
Internal profiles—profiles for ATG application users, including users of the Business Control Center. Examples – people who use the Business Control Center to manage targeted content; administrators who configure organizations and roles; Web site managers who deploy content to your production sites; and customer service representatives (Commerce Service Center users).
External profiles – profiles for Web site customers or visitors to non-commerce sites.
Preview profiles – if an ATG installation uses preview features, the environment can also include preview profiles, which are used to test content against a non-live profile before it is deployed.
If preview features are not enabled, the following profile repository model is used:
Profile Repository Model without Preview
The important thing to note about this model is that there are two instances of the ProfileAdapterRepository, both of which store external profiles and point to the production (unversioned) database. The Business Control Center uses the instance on the asset management server to edit and otherwise manage external profiles. In addition, there is an InternalProfileRepository on the asset management server, which stores internal (ATG application) user profiles and references dpi* tables (for example dpi_user) in the versioned ATG Content Administration database.
If preview features are enabled, an ATG installation uses the profile repository model shown below:
Profile Repository Model with Preview Enabled
As the diagram illustrates, in this configuration there are three profile repositories on the asset management server:
An
InternalProfileRepositoryAn
ExternalProfileRepositorythat points to the production (unversioned) database. This repository has the same function as theProfileAdapterRepositoryon the management server in the non-preview model. It references external (customer) profiles and gives the Business Control Center access to those profiles.An instance of the
ProfileAdapterRepositorythat manages a set of sample profiles used by preview features. The previewProfileAdapterRepositoryuses the dps* tables (for example,dps_user) in the versioned ATG Content Administration database. It uses the sameuserProfile.xmldefinition file as theProfileAdapterRepositoryon the production server. See Creating Profiles for information on how to populate this repository.
One profile repository is located on the production server: a ProfileAdapterRepository points to the production (unversioned) database. This repository stores external (customer) profiles.
