You can configure a dimension search using a packaged service
named
dimensionsearch or in a URL.
You can
use the
dimensionsearch service to retrieve the results of
dimension searches regardless of whether your purchase of Oracle Commerce
Guided Search includes Experience Manager. If it includes Experience Manager,
the common practice is to configure dimension searches using the Dimension
Search Results cartridge provided for that purpose. For more information, refer
to the
Oracle Commerce Guided Search Workbench User's Guide.
If you do not have Experience Manager, you can retrieve the results of
dimension searches only by means of the
dimensionsearch service.
To use the
dimensionsearch service, your application must define a
query in a URL that references
dimensionsearch. Your front end application can define
specialized queries in URLs and send them to your application's MDEX engine
when a shopper makes a selection using a web page control that is associated
with a particular URL. URL-based queries can override some or all of the query
configuration that you have specified in your application's configuration
files.
For example, the following URL invokes the
dimensionsearch service to perform a dimension search:
http://localhost:port/assembler-authoring/json/services/dimensionsearch?Ntt=fla*&Dy=1
Your application can configure the behavior of
dimensionsearch by inserting the D parameters of
UrlENEQuery into the URL. For information about the parameters of the
UrlENEQuery, refer to the
Presentation API for Java Reference (Javadoc).
Note
Use the parameter Ntt= rather than D= in the URL. You can use all the other D parameters.
In some cases, you may want create a query that returns all dimension values in all dimensions. In this case, you can specify * (an asterisk) as the string value to the Dimension (D) parameter, for example, D=*. This feature does not require you to select "Enable wildcard search" for the dimension values to be returned in the query. The parameter D=* is compatible with other additional dimension search parameters such as Di and Dn.
Note
A URL that invokes the
dimensionsearch service should include the following
parameters: Ntt; Di, which specifies the dimension Id; Dn=0; which filters out
dimension search results that are not on a record; Dk=1, which turns on
relevancy ranking; and Dx=, which specifies the relevance ranking strategy used
for this query. For example:
/dimensionsearch?Ntt=ca*&Di=900024&Dn=0&Dk=1&Dx=static(nbins,desc)
You can assign relevance ranking for dimension search at query time by specifying the Dx and Dk parameters of UrlENEQuery.
For more information about how to use the
dimensionsearch service to retrieve the results of
dimension searches, refer to the
Oracle Commerce Guided Search Assembler Application Developer's
Guide.
Note
Dimension searches can be configured to be either hierarchical or non-hierarchical. For information, see Hierarchical searches.
