In some cases, your product catalog may contain multiple SKU items that are variations of the same product. For example, the same rubber boots may be available in different colors. To simplify the display of such product data in results lists, you can configure an aggregated record to represent the product in general, and member records of the aggregated record to represent the different SKU items.

Configuring aggregated records

The following diagram illustrates how an aggregated record is configured by assembler-context.xml and the JSON document that configures properties:

To configure an aggregated record, follow these steps:

1. In the defaultFilterState bean of assembler-context.xml, specify the name of the record property that will serve as the rollup key. All records that have the same value for their rollup key property will be members of this aggregated record.

   You can specify only one rollup key per application. A version of assembler-context.xml is provided with the Discover Electronics reference application in the folder C:\Endeca\ToolsAndFrameworks\11.2.0\reference\discover-electronics\WEB-INF.

   Note

   If no rollup key property is configured, properties of the member records are returned with the aggregated record, rather than with the member records to which the properties belong.

2. A record property that will serve as the rollup key. The name of this property must be the rollup key name specified in assembler-context.xml (here, product.code). The definition of the rollup key property must include the parameter "isRollupKey" : true.

For information about how to configure relevance ranking for aggregated records, refer to the Oracle Commerce Guided Search MDEX Engine Developer's Guide.

Configuring derived properties of aggregated records

You can optionally configure a derived property to add to an aggregated record. You configure the value of the derived property to be the minimum, maximum, sum, or average of the values of a specified property of the member records.

The value of a derived property is calculated at runtime. If you refine your search by clicking additional or different dimension values, the value of the derived property is recalculated to reflect the resulting changes in the set of member records.

The following diagram illustrates the changes that you must make to assembler-context.xml and the JSON document that configures properties to configure an aggregated record with a derived property:

To add a derived property to the configuration of an aggregated record, follow these steps:

1. Configure a property whose values -- in one or more records -- will be the basis on which the value of the derived property is calculated.

2. Configure a property whose derivedPropertySource parameter specifies the record property whose value will be taken into account when the value of the derived property is calculated. This is the derived property.

For example, suppose that the member records for an aggregated record representing "Frederick's Castaway Boat Shoe" have the following values for their product.price property: 24.00, 89.95, and 120.00. At runtime, the product.min_price property of the aggregated record will be set to 24.00, the lowest of the three prices.

Note

Derived properties cannot be used for record sorting.

<bean id="resultsListDefaultConfig" scope="prototype" class="com.endeca.infront.cartridge.ResultsListConfig"> 
  ... 
  <property name="subRecordsPerAggregateRecord" value="ONE"/> 
  ...
</bean>

You configure which properties of an aggregated record and of its member records will be available to your front end application by listing these properties in the resultsListDefaultConfig bean. List properties of aggregated records in the fieldNames element and properties of member records in the subRecordFieldNames element:

<bean id="resultsListDefaultConfig" scope="prototype"	class="com.endeca.infront.cartridge.ResultsListConfig">
  <property name="fieldNames"> 
    <list>
      <value>product.id</value> 
      <value>product.code</value>
      <value>product.name</value>
      <value>product.brand.name</value> ... 
    </list>
  </property> 
  <property name="subRecordFieldNames"> 
    <list>
      <value>product.price</value> 
    </list> 
  </property>  
</bean>