To make repository items searchable, the ATG platform creates textual representations of these items. These textual representations are XHTML documents whose tags encode the parent and child relationships of the items, as well as information about their properties.
For example, an XHTML document that represents a Commerce product can include information about its parent category’s properties, as well as information about the properties of the child SKUs. This means that property values from this category (such as the name of the category) are included in each XHTML document representing an individual product, thus making it possible to search category and SKU properties as well as product properties.
To specify how to transform repository items to their XHTML representations, you create a definition file. This is an XML file that contains information such as the repository’s Nucleus location, and the repository item types and properties to include in the resulting XHTML documents.
