You can maintain separate profile repositories for external and internal users, and the Oracle Commerce Platform and most applications running on the Platform are configured by default to do so. External user profiles represent anyone who visits your externally-facing Web sites. For commerce sites, external users are typically customers. In B2B environments, customers are external users, although they may have administrative access to various components of your Web site.
Internal user profiles represent people within your organization who use Oracle Commerce Platform applications such as the Business Control Center or Commerce Service Center to create and manage site content. Maintaining distinct profiles for internal and external users has a number of benefits:
You can store information about your internal users in a separate data source from the profiles used with your outward-facing Web applications.
You can authenticate internal and external users separately, which helps eliminate the possibility of an external user gaining access to an internal application.
You can create different sets of targeters and scenarios for external and internal users. (This feature is typically used within Commerce Service Center applications, for example to display content to customer service representatives.)
The default external user profile repository is /atg/userprofiling/ProfileAdapterRepository
, which is defined by the userProfile.xml
file located in <ATG11dir>/DPS/config/profile.jar
. Each application that adds properties to the external user profile stores its userProfile.xml
file in an ExternalUsers
sub-module.
Internal profiles are stored in the /atg/userprofiling/InternalProfileRepository
, defined by the internalUserProfile.xml
file in <ATG11dir>/DPS/InternalUsers/config/config.jar
.
For information on the default internal/external profile repository model, including information on how the repositories are used by the Business Control Center and other Oracle Commerce Platform applications, refer to the Business Control Center Administration and Development Guide.
Internal Profile Repository
This chapter describes how to set up and configure the ProfileAdapterRepository
. However, the InternalProfileRepository
is also an instance of atg.adapter.gsa.GSARepository
, and you can extend and configure it using the methods described in this chapter for the ProfileAdapterRepository
.
Many of the services provided for the ProfileAdapterRepository
that are described in this manual also exist for the InternalProfileRepository
. For example, the Personalization module includes an /atg/userProfiling/InternalProfileTools
component, which is implementation of class atg.userprofiling.ProfileTools
configured for the InternalProfileRepository
.
A parallel set of database tables also exists for internal user profiles. Where the user
item in the ProfileAdapterRepository
references the dps_user
table, the user
item in the InternalProfileRepository
points to a dpi_user
table, and so on.
In most cases, external user profiles are created automatically when a user visits one of your Web sites. However, internal user profiles are typically not created in this way. After you have defined the properties that make up the internal profile repository, you must create individual profile items for each user in your system. The recommended interface for doing so is the Business Control Center. See the next section, Profile Repository Administration Interfaces.
Note that the Business Control Center is configured by default to accept logins from profiles in the internal user repository.