Your application displays content only if a specified set of search and navigation conditions exist in the rule. These conditions are known as triggers.
When you have created a rule, you can set it to display content at a specific location in your application. The location is defined by a particular set of refinements or search terms that trigger the content to appear.
There are also triggers to control who sees the content, as well as triggers to specify the times and dates when content is active.
By default, a new rule has no trigger until you add one. You can choose not to add any specific location and instead allow the content to appear at every location in your Web application. This means that relevant content appears with any query a user makes—with any search term or refinement state. It also means that anyone can see it, and it is not constrained by a time frame.
If you choose not to add any locations to your rule, assign it a low priority. If you don't assign it a low priority, it will take precedence over rules in the same folder that are designed specifically for certain locations and prevent them from appearing.
One or more refinements that trigger content if a user navigates to a location that contains any of those refinement states.
For example, if your location is set to trigger on the refinement state Cameras > Digital Cameras > Canon, and a user navigates to Cameras > Digital Cameras and then to Canon, your content appears. The content does not appear if the user navigates only to Cameras > Digital Cameras.
One or more search terms can trigger content to appear if a user's query includes the terms. You can specify one or more search terms and the match mode for the search terms. While you can only specify one search term or search term phrase per location, you can specify several locations for a single rule.
For example, if your location is set to trigger on the search term "Kodak," and a user searches for "Kodak," your content appears.
You can specify both a search term trigger and a refinement trigger for a rule. If a location contains both a search term and a refinement state, both sets of criteria must be met in order for the content to appear.
For example, if your location is set to trigger on the refinement state Cameras > Digital Cameras and the search term "Ricoh," a user must search for the term "Ricoh" from the Cameras > Digital Cameras refinement state in order for the content to display.
You can control who sees your content by associating the rule with a user segment. User segments enable Oracle Commerce applications to display content to an end user based on that user's identity.
For example, if you have a "Free Shipping" promotion but only "Members" are eligible, you would select the "Members" segment so that users identified as non-members would never see the promotion.
You can configure rules to be displayed only during specified periods of time by specifying start and end dates and, optionally, start and end times. The content will be displayed to users of your application only during the period of time that you specify.
For example, if you create a rule for a Digital Camera promotion that only runs between April 3 and May 6, you can set the promotion to automatically activate and deactivate on those dates.
Note that the Start Time, Start Date, End Time, and End Date values of rules are always evaluated with reference to the timezone of the Assembler. The timezone cannot be configured to any other time zone. This rule applies in Preview and in authoring and production environments.
If the timezone of your target audience is different from the timezone of the Assembler, you must take this difference into account when you set the Start Time, Start Date, End Time, and End Date values for content-items.
For example, if the Assembler is in a timezone three hours behind the timezone of the targeted audience for the web site, the start, end time of the content-items can be set to three hours earlier than the time when they are intended to be displayed. Thus, to cause these content-items to be displayed at 9:00 AM in the timezone of the web site's target audience, set their start time to 6:00 AM.
Similarly, if you preview your site in the context of a specific time - whether a time that you select in the Preview toolbar or the default preview date/time (which is the "current time" of your computer), that time will be interpreted in the timezone of the Assembler.
You can modify the current time in UserState using the
setDate() method of the UserState class (in the
com.endeca.infront.content package). For a description
of the UserState class, refer to the Javadoc for the Assembler core API jar.
