Handling hidden dimensions in an application

The UI can add hidden dimensions to the navigation state.

As a rule, the Oracle Commerce MDEX Engine only returns hidden dimensions and their values for single record requests and not for navigation requests. Hidden dimensions, when returned, are accessed in the same manner as regular (non-hidden) dimensions.

Marking a dimension as hidden is useful in cases where the dimension is composed of numerous values and returning these values as navigation options does not add useful navigation information. Consider, for example, an Authors dimension in a bookstore. Scanning thousands of authors for a specific name is less useful than simply using keyword search to find the desired author.

In this case, you would specify that the Authors dimension be hidden. The user will be able to perform a keyword search on a particular author, but will not be able to browse on author names in order to find books by the author. Also, once the user has located a desired book (either by keyword search or by navigating within other dimensions), she may be interested in other books by the same author.

While the user would have been unable to refine her navigation by choosing an author, after finding a particular book she can include that author in her navigation state, in effect creating a store of books by that author. (The activity of adding or removing dimension values to or from the navigation state is known as pivoting.)

In cases where certain dimensions in an application are composed of many values (see the Authors dimension example above), marking such dimensions as hidden will improve Oracle Commerce Presentation API and Oracle Commerce MDEX Engine performance to the extent that queries on large dimensions will be limited, reducing the processing cycles and amount of data the engine must return.

When a dimension is hidden, the precompute phase of indexing will be shortened because refinements from hidden dimensions need not be computed.

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