You can also configure a dimension search using a packaged service named dimensionsearch or in a URL.
You can use the dimensionsearch service to retrieve the results of dimension searches regardless of whether your purchase of Oracle Commerce Guided Search includes Experience Manager. If it includes Experience Manager, the common practice is to configure dimension searches using the Dimension Search Results cartridge provided for that purpose. For more information, refer to the Oracle Commerce Guided Search Workbench User's Guide.
If you do not have Experience Manager, you can retrieve the results of dimension searches only by means of the dimensionsearch service.
To use the dimensionsearch service, your application must define a query in a URL that references dimensionsearch. Your front end application can define specialized queries in URLs and send them to your application's MDEX engine when a shopper makes a selection using a web page control that is associated with a particular URL. URL-based queries can override some or all of the query configuration that you have specified in your application's configuration files.
For example, the following URL invokes the dimensionsearch service to perform a dimension search:
http://localhost:8006/assembler-authoring/json/services/dimensionsearch?Ntt=fla*&Dy=1
Your application can configure the behavior of dimensionsearch by inserting the D parameters of UrlENEQuery into the URL. For information about the parameters of the UrlENEQuery, refer to the Presentation API for Java Reference (Javadoc).
Note
Use the parameter Ntt= rather than D= in the URL. You can use all the other D parameters.
In some cases, you may want create a query that returns all dimension values in all dimensions. In this case, you can specify * (an asterisk) as the string value to the Dimension (D) parameter, for example, D=*. This feature does not require you to select "Enable wildcard search" for the dimension values to be returned in the query. The parameter D=* is compatible with other additional dimension search parameters such as Di and Dn.
Note
A URL that invokes the dimensearchservice should include the following parameters: Ntt; Di, which specifies the dimension Id; Dn=0; which filters out dimension search results that are not on a record; Dk=1, which turns on relevancy ranking; and Dx=, which specifies the relevance ranking strategy used for this query. For example:
/dimensionsearch?Ntt=ca*&Di=900024&Dn=0&Dk=1&Dx=static(nbins,desc)
You can assign relevance ranking for dimension search at query time by specifying the Dx and Dk parameters of UrlENEQuery.
For more information about how to use the dimensionsearch service to retrieve the results of dimension searches, refer to the Oracle Commerce Guided Search Assembler Application Developer's Guide.
Note
Dimension searches can be configured to be either hierarchical or non-hierarchical. For information, see Hierarchical searches.