The Web application modules are responsible for receiving client requests and passing those requests to the MDEX Engine, by means of the Presentation API.
You build custom application modules for each Guided Search application. These modules can take many forms, depending on your application’s requirements.
The Guided Search software package includes a set of sample UI reference implementations that you can refer to when building your own application modules.
Regardless of how you choose to build them, the application modules must perform the following functions:
Application modules transform client browser requests into MDEX Engine queries.
Before Web application modules can send a request from a client browser to the MDEX Engine, the modules must transform the request into an MDEX Engine query.
To make this transformation, the application modules extract the MDEX Engine-specific parameters from the original client request. In some cases, the modules also edit the extracted parameters or add additional parameters, as necessary.
The following diagram illustrates how a client browser request is transformed into an MDEX Engine query:
Several techniques exist for passing the query request parameters from the client browser request to the application modules.
You can use one of the following techniques:
For example, in the UI reference implementations that are included with the Oracle Commerce Platform Services package, client request parameters are embedded directly in the URL. This technique eases development and ensures load balancing, redundancy and statelessness.
