To make repository items searchable, the Oracle ATG Web Commerce platform creates textual representations of these items. These textual representations are XHTML documents whose tags contain the values of the repository item’s properties. The XHTML is written out in a form that allows it to be efficiently streamed for indexing.
The XHTML documents also encode the parent and child relationships of the items. For example, an XHTML document that represents an Oracle ATG Web Commerce product can include information about its parent category’s properties, as well as information about the properties of the child SKUs. This makes 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 configure a globally scoped Nucleus component of class atg.repository.search.indexing.IndexingOutputConfig. (An IndexingOutputConfig component applies to only one repository, so for each repository you want to index, you must create one or more separate components.) The IndexingOutputConfig class has a number of properties that configure various aspects of the XHTML document creation and submission process. This section describes some of the key aspects of configuring an IndexingOutputConfig component.
Note that the DCS.Search module includes an IndexingOutputConfig component named /atg/commerce/search/ProductCatalogOutputConfig that is preconfigured to work with a typical catalog repository. See Indexing Commerce Catalog Data for more information.
