Siebel Loyalty Engine Reference

This appendix provides information about the Siebel Loyalty Engine. It includes the following topics:

Siebel Loyalty Server High-Level Architecture

The Siebel Loyalty Engine can be deployed in two ways:

Running in the background, continually processing eligible objects such as transactions or tiers.
Running in a real-time mode, processing requests from clients on demand.

The following image shows the deployment of the Siebel Loyalty Engine batch server component.

The Loyalty Engine has the following high-level architecture:

The batch component is a multithreaded component that can be deployed to run multiple processes on multiple Siebel Business Application servers.
Each process processes transactions assigned to the keys that have been registered by that process.
Within each process:
- The cache is a static object that is loaded at startup. The cache contains all the active programs and promotions that are required for processing transactions. The cache can be viewed as the main data.
- Among all the threads, the first thread assumes the role of the queue manager thread. All the remaining threads become processing threads.
- The Queue Manager thread is responsible for:
- Acquiring the key to process transactions.
- Initializing the cache object.
- Initializing the queue of objects that must be processed by the processing threads.
- When all the objects are processed and the queue is empty, requerying for new objects to fill the queue.
The processing threads:
- Request objects (transactions, tiers) from the queue manager and process them.
- For each object, commit the results in one database transaction.

For information about how the Loyalty Engine uses server keys, see Setting Up Server Keys for Siebel Loyalty. For information about Siebel Loyalty server components, see Setting Up Server Components for Siebel Loyalty.

Siebel Loyalty Engine Object Processing

The following table shows the object types processed by the Loyalty Engine, and the business object and primary business component associated with each object. For additional information about the object types, see Specifying Objects Processed by the Siebel Loyalty Engine.

Type	Business Object and Primary Business Component
Transaction	LOY Transaction Processor LOY Engine Transaction
Tier	LOY Tier Processor LOY Engine Member Tier
Bucket	LOY Promotion Bucket Processor LOY Promotion Bucket
Accrual	LOY Accrual Expiration Processor LOY Member Accrual Item

The component parameter LOYEngineQueueObjects determines which primary business components of the business objects shown in the previous table are queried for processing. Each of the primary business components has user properties that determine the criteria and sequence of processing.

The following table describes the user properties of the LOY Engine Transaction business component, which illustrate the typical use of user properties by the business components shown in the previous table.

User Property Name	Description
LOY Queue Manager SearchSpec: Batch	The search specification used by the batch component to query for eligible records. In addition to this specification, the engine includes the criteria for the key (server and process number) that has been registered by the process.
LOY Queue Manager SortSpec: Batch	The sort specification to use to determine the order of processing for batch component.
LOY Queue Manager SearchSpec: Realtime	The search specification used by the real-time component to query for eligible records. In addition to this specification, the search also includes the row id of the record to be processed. This means that the record also must meet these criteria in order to be processed in real-time.
LOY Queue Manager SortSpec: Realtime	The sort specification to use to determine the order of processing for the real-time component. Usually empty as only one record is retrieved.
LOY Engine Activate Field n	The fields that must be activated by the engine during processing. Each entry in the numbered list of user properties corresponds to a field on the business component. Customers must not remove or inactivate any of these user properties.
LOY Engine Attributes LOV n	Each entry in this numbered list of user properties specifies a LOV Type whose values contain a list of fields that must be activated by the engine during processing. Note that these LOV Types are nontranslatable and the Language Independent Code must be the same as the Display Name. Customers must not remove or inactivate any of these user properties.

Siebel Loyalty and Siebel Remote

The transaction logging that is used by Oracle’s Siebel Remote is not supported for the tables that are updated by the Loyalty Engine. This limitation applies to all the business components included in the LOY Engine Updater business object. The Log Changes property is set to FALSE on these business components and must not be changed.