If your Oracle ATG Web Commerce installation includes both Oracle ATG Web Commerce Search and Oracle ATG Web Commerce Merchandising, you have access to Search Merchandising, which is a set of search features that are especially useful for customizing and presenting search results on commerce sites. To use Search Merchandising, you define facets and search configurations in Merchandising.
A facet is a search refinement element (similar to a constraint) that corresponds to a property of a product or SKU. The property is referred to as a faceting property. The values of this property are broken down into selections that can be either ranges or specific values. For example, you might define a price facet whose faceting property is the salePrice property of a product’s SKUs. The selection ranges, which can either be determined dynamically or specified explicitly, might be $100 to $200, $200 to $500, $500 to $1000, etc. Or you might define a manufacturer facet with selection values of Acme, Cogswell, and Spacely. Site visitors can select facet values to narrow down the set of items returned by a search.
You can specify facets and the logic for creating the selections in Merchandising as part of creating product catalogs. Facet data is stored in the refinement repository (/atg/search/repository/RefinementRepository).
Search configurations are sets of rules that determine the order of search results and whether certain items should be excluded from the results. Search configurations enable commerce sites to customize search results based on site initiatives and customer purchasing patterns. For example, a search configuration aimed at low-budget customers might specify that less expensive items should be displayed first, and that if the query contains the word “bargain”, all items whose price is above $100.00 should be excluded from the results. You can create a number of different search configurations; when a customer enters a search query, logic on the site determines which search configuration to apply, based on criteria such as the user segments the customer belongs to.
Data for the search configurations is stored in the refinement repository, along with the refinement configuration data used for facets. When you deploy your catalog repository to your production site, the refinement repository is deployed as well. When you index the catalog repository, the data in the refinement repository is used to create refinement configuration files and search configuration files, which are XML files used by Search to specify the logic associated with the facets and search configurations.
Note: The facets created in Merchandising are closely tied to Commerce catalog structure. Search also supports creation of facets in Search Administration, but these facets lack the necessary information required for commerce facets, and are not suitable for use on commerce sites.
See the ATG Merchandising Guide for Business Users for information about creating facets and search configurations.
