Configuring Profile Repositories

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 ATG Business Control Center. Examples – people who use the ATG Business Control Center to manage targeted content; administrators who configure organizations and roles; Web site managers who deploy content to the production site; ATG Outreach users; and customer service representatives (ATG Service users).

  • External profiles – profiles for Web site customers (for ATG Commerce or ATG Service installations), 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 ATG Business Control Center uses the instance on the management server to edit and otherwise manage external profiles. In addition, there is an InternalProfileRepository on the 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 management server:

  • An InternalProfileRepository

  • An ExternalProfileRepository that points to the production (unversioned) database. This repository has the same function as the ProfileAdapterRepository on the management server in the non-preview model. It references external (customer) profiles and gives the ATG Business Control Center access to those profiles.

  • An instance of the ProfileAdapterRepository that manages a set of sample profiles used by preview features. The preview ProfileAdapterRepository uses the dps* tables (for example, dps_user) in the versioned ATG Content Administration database. It uses the same userProfile.xml definition file as the ProfileAdapterRepository on the production server. See Setting Up Preview Features for information on how to configure and populate this repository.

One profile repository is located on the production server:

  • A ProfileAdapterRepository that points to the production (unversioned) database. This repository stores external (customer) profiles.

 
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