Using dynamic business rules to promote records

You implement merchandising and content spotlighting using dynamic business rules. The rules and their supporting constructs define when to promote records, which records may be promoted, and also indicate how to display the records to application users.

Endeca provides the functionality to promote contextually relevant records to application users as they search and navigate within a data set. In catalog applications, this activity is called merchandising because the Endeca records you promote often represent product data. In document repositories, this activity is called content spotlighting™ because the Endeca records you promote often represent some type of document (HTML, DOC, TXT, XLS, and so on). For the sake of simplicity, this help system uses 'promoting records' to generically describe both merchandising and content spotlighting.

Here is a simple merchandising example using a wine data set. An application user enters a query with the search term Bordeaux. This search term triggers a rule that is set up to promote wines tagged as Best Buys. In addition to returning standard query results for term Bordeaux, the rule instructs the MDEX Engine to dynamically generate a subset of records that are tagged with both the Best Buy and also Bordeaux properties. The Web application displays the standard query results that match Bordeaux and also displays some number of the rule results in an area of the screen set aside for 'Best Buy' records. These are the promoted records.