The rules and their supporting constructs define when to promote records, which records may be promoted, and also indicate how to display the records to application users.
Note
This chapter applies to applications using the dynamic business rules feature as configured in Developer Studio, Oracle Commerce Workbench 2.1.x with Rule Manager, and the Oracle Commerce Presentation API.
If your application is based on Workbench 2.1.x with Page Builder and the Content Assembler API, read the Page Builder Developer's Guide and the Content Assembler Developer's Guide.
If your application is based on Oracle Commerce Experience Manager 3.1.x and the Oracle Commerce Assembler API, read the Assembler Application Developer's Guide.
This feature can be referred to in two ways, depending on the nature of your data:
In a retail catalog application, this activity is called merchandising, because the Oracle Commerce records you promote often represent product data.
In a document repository, this activity is called content spotlighting, because the Oracle Commerce records you promote often represent some type of document (HTML, DOC, TXT, XLS, and so on).
You implement merchandising and content spotlighting using dynamic business rules. Here is a simple merchandising example using a wine data set:
An application user enters a query with the search term Bordeaux.
This search term triggers a rule that is set up to promote wines tagged as Best Buys.
In addition to returning standard query results for term Bordeaux, the rule instructs the MDEX Engine to dynamically generate a subset of records that are tagged with both the Best Buy and Bordeaux properties.
The Web application displays the standard query results that match Bordeaux, as well as some number of the rule results in an area of the screen set aside for “Best Buy” records. These are the promoted records.
Note
For the sake of simplicity, this document uses “promoting records” to generically describe both merchandising and content spotlighting.