Gear alerts are notifications that originate from a gear event, are filtered and targeted by Oracle Commerce Personalization, and are presented to their target audience.
The gear developer must determine the events within the gear that are significant enough to capture and translate into alerts. When those events take place, the events’ types and properties are translated into a Java message bean. The message bean is then published via the Java Message Service (JMS) and is consumable by any JMS client configured as a listener to that event.
The gear developer must configure the Scenario module to listen to and process the messages that the gear publishes. The Scenario module is responsible for receiving the gear messages, performing any filtering that is desired, and determining who should receive the alert notification. The logic for all of this is based on the criteria defined in the scenario segment. Since the scenario segments can perform complex filtering and targeting based on the properties of the gear’s message bean, this process is dynamic.
Once the Scenario module has finished its part, it sends the gear message bean and targeting information along to the AlertMgr. The AlertMgr is a global Nucleus component that is responsible for persisting the alert, formatting the alert in a locale-sensitive manner, and sending the alert to the appropriate targets.
The AlertMgr persists alerts to the AlertRepository. The AlertRepository is a persistent store and is accessed by the Alerts gear to retrieve alerts that will be displayed by a Web browser.
Each gear event that needs to be translated into an alert must register the event type and a ResourceBundle with the AlertMgr. The ResourceBundle contains the event’s unformatted alert text and defines the properties of the gear message bean that will be used to format the alert text into a displayable String. Each ResourceBundle must be translated to the locales that need to be supported.
The Alerts Gear is responsible for displaying the appropriate alerts on a page within a Web browser. When a request to display alerts is received by the Alerts Gear, the appropriate alerts are retrieved from the AlertRepository and then formatted by the AlertMgr. The AlertMgr provides an API for formatting the alert based on the request’s locale and the gear message bean properties that have been persisted with the alert.
The AlertMgr may also send e-mail alert notifications if desired. The AlertMgr leverages the DPS Targeted Email system to provide this functionality. Each gear event must specify in its ResourceBundle the name of the e-mail template that is to be used to create the targeted e-mail.
In addition to gear alerts, ATG Portal generates administrative alerts and framework alerts, which work in basically the same way as gear alerts, but which are generated by the Portal Administration or the PAF. See Administrative Alerts and Framework Alerts.
