Relationships among items in a catalog can be very complex. Any time you make changes to the catalog, those relationships might change. Maintaining these relationships is vital in order to allow customers to navigate and search your catalogs. Oracle ATG Web Commerce catalogs use several batch and dynamic services to perform catalog updates and to verify catalog relationships. These services are collectively referred to as the Catalog Maintenance System (CMS).

The CMS updates property values that enable navigation and hierarchical search (see the Catalog Navigation and Searching chapter of the Commerce Guide to Setting Up a Store). It also verifies the relationships of catalog repository items and properties. These services can be run either on demand or in scheduled mode, and each service performs functions that can be selectively executed using the function names.

This chapter includes the following sections:

Important: If you add items to catalog folders, the catalog maintenance services propagate site membership from those folders to the items added. If you remove items from those folders, however, they remain linked to their sites; the CMS has no way to know if the site association existed before the catalog folder relationship.