Ensuring promoted records are always produced

You ensure promoted records are always produced by creating a zone in Developer Studio to associate with a number of dynamic business rules.

A zone is a logical collection of rules that allows you to have multiple rules available, in case a single rule does not produce a result. The rules in a zone ensure that the screen space dedicated to displaying promoted records is always populated.

A zone has a rule limit that dictates how many rules may successfully return rule results. For example, if three rules are assigned to a certain zone but the rule limit is set to one, only the first rule to successfully provide rule results is evaluated. Any remaining rules in the zone are ignored.

  1. In the Project Explorer, expand Dynamic Business Rules .
  2. Double-click Zones to open the Zones view.
  3. Click New to open the Zone editor.
  4. In the Name field, provide a unique name for the zone.
  5. (Optional) If you want to limit the number of rules that can provide rule results within a zone, type a number in the Rule Limit text box.
  6. (Optional) If you want to randomly order the rules in the zone, select the Shuffle rules check box. When checked, this indicates that the MDEX Engine randomly shuffles the order of the rules within this zone before evaluating them.
  7. (Optional) Select Valid for Search to indicate whether a zone (and all of the rules associated with that zone) is valid for navigation queries that include a record search parameter. Rules that include a keyword trigger require the Valid for Search setting.
  8. (Optional) If you want to prevent the same record from appearing multiple times for multiple rules, check Unique by This Dimension/Property and specify a unique record criterion. Selecting a dimension or property allows the MDEX Engine to identify individual records and prevent the same record from appearing multiple times. If you check Unique by This Dimension/Property and do not select a dimension or property, the same record may appear multiple times for multiple rules. Note that this setting applies across all zones.
  9. Click OK.

Fully implementing this feature requires additional work outside of Developer Studio. Please refer to the Endeca Advanced Development Guide as well as the Endeca Workbench Help system for details.