Creating new item descriptors and properties in a repository typically involves modifying the repository’s database schema and XML definition file, and then restarting your application to make the changes available. If you want to avoid restarting, however, the Oracle Commerce Platform provides an alternate mechanism for dynamically creating subtypes of existing item types and adding properties to static and dynamic item types. This mechanism involves creating metadata items for the subtypes and properties through a Content Administration project and deploying these metadata items. The system then generates the new subtypes and properties from the metadata, and adds them to the repository definition automatically. Data for these properties is stored in database tables that are included specifically for this purpose in the default schema.

The Oracle Commerce Platform can create Endeca records from these items and properties and submit them to Oracle Commerce Guided Search for indexing. You can add dynamic item types and properties to the definition files of your EndecaIndexingOutputConfig components in the same way that you add static item types and properties.

However, adding these item types and properties in this way requires restarting the Oracle Commerce Platform to make the EndecaIndexingOutputConfig definition file changes available. To avoid restarting, you can use an alternate approach to specify dynamic item types and properties for indexing without modifying EndecaIndexingOutputConfig definition files. Instead, you provide the necessary specifications when you create the metadata items that the dynamic types and properties are generated from.

This chapter describes how to specify indexing information for dynamic item types and properties without requiring a restart. It includes the following sections:

Note that this chapter assumes you are already familiar with dynamic item types and properties. See the Creating Dynamic Item Types and Properties chapter of the Content Administration Programming Guide.