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Overview of Registering Customers and Managing Customer Services
The processes related to customer profiles and self-service are necessary components of any e-business expecting return customers. To help you get to market faster than your competitors, WebLogic Portal provides you with the Registering Customers and Managing Customer services. This package contains default implementations for the most common pre- and post-order processing services (registration, login, customer profile creation/updates, and customer self-service pages). The registration and customer JSP templates also allow your site designers to customize these processes, without the need for advanced programming skills. This topic provides you with some background information about the Registering Customers and Managing Customer services, and introduces you to the types of services that are available.
This topic includes the following sections:
What Are the Registering Customers and Managing Customer Services?
The Registering Customers and Managing Customer services are a collection of JSP templates used to facilitate the registration of customers with your e-business site and the activities customers can perform after registering. There are services for registration, login, customer profile creation/updates, and so on. Additionally, the customer self-service pages provide your customers with the ability to check the status of orders and payments.
As shown in Figure 1-1, each service in the package consists of one or more JavaServer Pages (JSPs) and the business logic associated with them. Some of these templates may collect information from your customers, while others will simply display dynamic data your customer previously supplied. Some JSPs may do both. This logic is implemented as a combination of Input Processors and Pipeline Components, each of which can be modified to suit your needs. You can also create your own Input Processors and Pipeline Components to plug into the JSP templates for the Registering Customers and Managing Customer services.
Because all of the business logic is managed by Pipeline Processor and accessed within a Pipeline Processor session, the state of your customers' experiences can be maintained. For detailed information, see the Guide to Managing Presentation and Business Logic: Using Webflow and Pipeline.
In addition to the templates available in the Registering Customers and Managing Customer services, the Commerce services also contain templates for browsing the product catalog and for order and purchase processing. For information on services related to the product catalog, see the Guide to Building a Product Catalog. For information on services related to order and purchase processing, see the Guide to Managing Purchases and Processing Orders.
High-level Architecture
The Registering Customers and Managing Customer services is essentially an application that utilizes the Webflow infrastructure. Before you begin to customize or extend this application, however, it is important that you have a high-level understanding of how all the JSP templates work together in the default Webflow. It is also important that you understand how this package works in conjunction with the order and purchase processing JSP templates described in the Guide to Managing Purchases and Processing Orders.
Figure 1-2 shows the ways in which a customer might move through the JSP templates in the login and registration portion of the Registering Customers and Managing Customer services. It also shows how the customer-processing services, the product catalog services, and the order and purchase processing services are used.
Note: The shopping cart management piece of the Webflow is not discussed in this document. For more information about the shopping cart and the checkout process, see "Shopping Cart Management Services" in the Guide to Managing Purchases and Processing Orders.
Figure 1-2 Default Webflow for Login/Registration
Figure 1-3 shows the ways in which your customer might move through the JSP templates in the customer-processing and customer self-service portions of the Registering Customers and Managing Customer services. It also shows how the product catalog services, the order and purchase processing services, and the login/registration JSPs are used. Figure 1-3 Default Webflow for customer Processing/Customer Self-Service
Note: All JSP templates include other templates, making it easy for you to create new pages with the same look and feel. Whether you are customizing or extending this architecture, everything you need to know about the Registering Customers and Managing Customer services is provided in this document.
Template Quick Reference
The JSP templates in this guide are shown in the following table.
About the Database Schema
The database schema used for Registering Customers and Managing Customer services is the one used for the BEA personalization services. For more information about this database schema, see the " WebLogic Personalization Server Database Schema" in the Guide to Building Personalized Applications. Additionally, customer profiles in the BEA Commerce services are implemented as Unified User Profiles (UUP). For more information about UUP, see "Creating and Managing Users" in the Guide to Building Personalized Applications.
Development Roles
This document is intended for the following audiences:
Next Steps
Subsequent chapters of this document describe the Registering Customers and Managing Customer services in detail, and provide you with information about how to customize or extend the default implementations to meet your requirements. These chapters are as follows:
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