Disable components in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator

With this Feature Pack, new business user tooling is provided, called the Management Center. By default, after you have enabled the Management Center for Feature Pack 3, the individual tools within the Management Center are automatically enabled, so that your business users can be productive with it immediately.

 

Considerations

Catalogs

The new Catalogs tool offers a more intuitive, and more responsive user interface than the one found in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator version of the tool.

Promotions

In order to simplify the task of finding promotions, new search capabilities have been introduced. This capability depends upon the addition of an index table in the database. The WebSphere Commerce Accelerator based tool does not support this indexing, so once you start using the new tool, use of the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator version of the tool should cease immediately.

Marketing

The Marketing tool in the new Management Center makes use of a new run time, which is not compatible with the previous version, and must be enabled manually. If you are currently making use of campaigns, and Web or e-mail activities, and you wish to use the new Management Center tool for marketing, recreate them in the new tools or wait for a migration tool to become available.

Customizations

If you have customized the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, verify which customizations you have in place, and whether they have already been handled in a suitable manner by the new tools in the Management Center before performing the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator disabling tasks.

Once you have determined which of the new Management Center tools are to remain enabled, disable the corresponding menu items in WebSphere Commerce Accelerator in order to avoid data loss or corruption. Each store type has a file that defines what the user will see in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator menus. The XML files that define the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator can be found in the wc_profiledir/xml/tools/common directory. Depending on the store models you have in use, modify one or more of these files. For additional information on these store types and the names of the files to be altered, see Customizing the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator home page. Refer to Disable Management Center Tools for instructions on how to disable individual tools in the Management Center.

The following steps assume that you have not customized the menu selections. If you have customized the menu selections, take that into consideration when performing these steps.

 

Disable WebSphere Commerce Accelerator menu selections

Before proceeding with the following, be sure to make a backup copy of the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator definition files that work with. These steps are specific to the Consumer Direct model, but other models are similar.

Verify that your business users will not see the menu items that you have removed, by logging onto WebSphere Commerce Accelerator and checking the menu items. Once you have confirmed that your system is operating correctly using the new Management Center tools, you can remove the commented sections of the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator configuration file. You may also want to modify the information shown on the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator home page for you store type to remove the information about what the menu items contain so that your business users are not misled. For example, the "Merchandise" and "Marketing" sections on the main screen (see AcceleratorHomeB2C.jsp in the wc_profiledir/CommerceAccelerator.war/tools/common/ directory) refer to functions that are going to be commented in the previous section, which have moved to the Management Center.

 

Disable Management Center Tools

By default, the business user tools in the Management Center are enabled, or visible, based on specific user roles and access control policies. If your business users are ready to begin to leverage the new tools immediately, then you need only disable the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator tools as documented above. However, there may be cases where you do not wish to give business users access to all of the new tooling immediately, and you will need to perform some steps to disable those parts of the tooling.
The Management Center tools, by default, are available for each store type. The mapping of the store types to the Management Center tools supported for them, is handled through a configuration file. The configuration file, wc-component.xml, is stored in the WC_eardir/xml/config/com.ibm.commerce.infrastructure folder. Within that file are sets of mapping values used to control the authorities, access, and roles for store services. The section of that file which handles the mapping of the store types for the Management Center tools resembles the following:
<_config:valuemapping externalName="StoreType" internalName="StoreType">   
     <!-- Map tool type to STORE.STORETYPE in database -->   
     <_config:valuemap externalValue="IBM_CatalogTool" 
           internalValue="B2C, B2B, BBB" />   
     <_config:valuemap externalValue="IBM_MarketingTool" 
           internalValue="B2C, B2B, BBB" />   
     <_config:valuemap externalValue="IBM_PromotionTool" 
           internalValue="B2C, B2B, BBB" /> 
</_config:valuemapping>
By default, the B2C (Consumer Direct model), B2B, and basic B2B store types are enabled for each of the Management Center tools. In order to change that level of support, you will need to create a configuration file that will override these values.

  1. Navigate to the WC_eardir/xml/config folder..

  2. Create a new folder called com.ibm.commerce.infrastructure-ext.

  3. Create a file within that folder, called wc-component.xml.

  4. Copy the following to the new file: 
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>  
<!--********************************************************************--> 
<!--  Licensed Materials - Property of IBM                              --> 
<!--                                                                    --> 
<!--  WebSphere Commerce                                                --> 
<!--                                                                    --> 
<!--  (c) Copyright IBM Corp. 2007                                      --> 
<!--                                                                    --> 
<!--                                                                    --> 
<!--********************************************************************-->  

<_config:DevelopmentComponentConfiguration 
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"   
      xmlns:_config="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/commerce/foundation/config"          
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/commerce/foundation/config ../xsd/wc-component.xsd ">    

    <_config:valuemappingservice>     
        <_config:valuemapping externalName="StoreType" internalName="StoreType">                   
            <!-- Map tool type to STORE.STORETYPE in database -->       
            <_config:valuemap externalValue="IBM_CatalogTool" internalValue="B2C, B2B, BBB" />       
            <_config:valuemap externalValue="IBM_MarketingTool" internalValue="B2C, B2B, BBB" />       
            <_config:valuemap externalValue="IBM_PromotionTool" internalValue="B2C, B2B, BBB" />     
        </_config:valuemapping>   
    </_config:valuemappingservice> 
</_config:DevelopmentComponentConfiguration>

  5. Remove the <_config:valuemap .../> entries that you do not want to override. For example, if you want to only limit support for the Marketing tools, remove the others: 
    <_config:valuemap externalValue="IBM_CatalogTool" internalValue="B2C, B2B, BBB" />  
and  
<_config:valuemap externalValue="IBM_PromotionTool" internalValue="B2C, B2B, BBB" />

  6. To restrict support for a tool to only a particular store type, remove the other store types from the internalValue list. For example, to limit the Marketing tools to only support Consumer Direct stores, the entry should be: 
    <_config:valuemap externalValue="IBM_MarketingTool" internalValue="B2C" />

  7. To remove all access to a tool from the Management Center, remove all store types from its internalValue list. It is not sufficient to simply comment the entry, as this will not override the default definition. For example, to remove the Marketing tool from the Management Center, you would have this entry: 
    <_config:valuemap externalValue="IBM_MarketingTool" internalValue="" />

  8. Save and close the file.

  9. You will now need to deploy this entire folder to the application server. For details on how to do this, see help topic Deploying J2EE assets for a single file.

  10. Once you have deployed the file, restart your server instance for the changes to take effect.

  11. Log in to the Management Center to verify that the tools have been disabled properly.