Your application can return record sets based on specific keys.

A set of Oracle Commerce records is returned with every navigation query result. By default, each record includes the values from all the keys (properties and dimensions) that have record page and record list attributes. These attributes are set with the Show with Record (for record page) and Show with Record List (for record list) checkboxes, as configured in Developer Studio.

However, if you do not want all the key values, you can control the characteristics of the records returned by navigation queries by using the Select feature.

The Select feature enables you to select specific keys (Oracle Commerce properties and/or dimensions) from the data so that only a subset of values will be transferred for Oracle Commerce records in a query result set. The Select functionality allows the application developer to determine these keys dynamically, instead of at dgraph startup. This selection overrides the default record page and record list fields.

A Web application that does not make use of all of the properties and dimension values on a record can be more efficient by only requesting the values that it will use. The ability to limit what fields are returned is useful for exporting bulk-format records and other scenarios. For example, if a record has properties that correspond to the same data in a number of languages, the application can retrieve only the properties that correspond to the current language. Or, the application may render the record list using tabs to display different sets of data columns (e.g., one tab to view customer details and another to view order details without always returning the data needed to populate both tabs).

This functionality prevents the transferring of unneeded properties and dimension values when they will not be used by the front-end Web application. It therefore makes the application more efficient because the unneeded data does not take up network bandwidth and memory on the application server.

The Select feature can also be used to specifically request fields that are not transferred by default.