Oracle Commerce Guided Search comprises three major components.
The components interact with your data sources and application as shown in the following figure:
The Information Transformation Layer (ITL) reads your raw source data and manipulates it into a set of MDEX Engine indexes. The ITL consists of the Content Acquisition System (which includes the CAS Server and Console, the CAS API and the Guided Search Web Crawler), and the Data Foundry (which includes data-manipulation programs such as Forge).
The MDEX Engine is the query engine that is the core of Guided Search. The MDEX Engine consists of the Indexer (Dgidx), and the Dgraph. The MDEX Engine loads the indexes generated by the indexing component of the Endeca Information Transformation Layer. Although the Indexer (also known as Dgidx) is installed as part of the MDEX Engine package, in effect it is part of the ITL process.
After the indexes are loaded, the MDEX Engine receives queries from the Endeca Application Tier, executes them against the loaded indexes, and returns the results to the client application. The Oracle Commerce (Endeca) Assembler, a server-side framework, acts as the Application Tier interface to the MDEX Engine. It aggregates queries, sends them to the MDEX Engine, and performs any necessary post-processing on the results. Customers using additional or alternate data sources can extend the Assembler with their own custom code to instead query those data sources.
Note
The ITL components are run offline at intervals that are appropriate for your business requirements. The MDEX Engine and Endeca Application Tier are both online processes; that is, they must remain running as long as you want clients to have access to your data set.
