As explained in the Managing User Profiles chapter of this guide, an Oracle Commerce Platform environment can contain three kinds of user profiles:
Internal profiles—profiles for Oracle Commerce Platform users, including users of the Business Control Center. Examples – people who use the Business Control Center to manage targeted content; administrators who configure organizations and roles; Web site managers who deploy content to your production sites; and customer service representatives (Commerce Service Center users).
External profiles – profiles for Web site customers or visitors to non-commerce sites.
Preview profiles – if your installation uses preview features, the environment can also include preview profiles, which are used to test content against a non-live profile before it is deployed.
If preview features are not enabled, the following profile repository model is used:
The important thing to note about this model is that there are two instances of the ProfileAdapterRepository
, both of which store external profiles and point to the production (unversioned) database. The Business Control Center uses the instance on the asset management server to edit and otherwise manage external profiles. In addition, there is an InternalProfileRepository
on the asset management server, which stores internal user profiles and references dpi* tables (for example dpi_user
) in the versioned ATG Content Administration database.
If preview features are enabled, an Oracle Commerce Platform installation uses the profile repository model shown as follows:
As the diagram illustrates, in this configuration there are three profile repositories on the asset management server:
An
InternalProfileRepository
An
ExternalProfileRepository
that points to the production (unversioned) database. This repository has the same function as theProfileAdapterRepository
on the management server in the non-preview model. It references external (customer) profiles and gives the Business Control Center access to those profiles.An instance of the
ProfileAdapterRepository
that manages a set of sample profiles used by preview features. The previewProfileAdapterRepository
uses thedps*
tables (for example,dps_user
) in the versioned ATG Content Administration database. It uses the sameuserProfile.xml
definition file as theProfileAdapterRepository
on the production server. See Creating Profiles for information on how to populate this repository.
One profile repository is located on the production server: a ProfileAdapterRepository
points to the production (unversioned) database. This repository stores external (customer) profiles.