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WebSphere Commerce Flow infrastructure
WebSphere Commerce Flow describes the configurable features that are available in a store or site, and provides a means to enable or disable individual features. Store or site administrators can configure such features through a user interface, such as the Change Flow notebook, changing the flow or style of the store or site without making any changes to its JSP or properties files. After applying the new store configuration, the changes are immediately visible by refreshing the store pages in the Web browser.
The following diagram illustrates the basic infrastructure of and interaction within and without WebSphere Commerce Flow, which are detailed in this section:
The main components of WebSphere Commerce Flow include:
- Flow Repository
- The Flow Repository is a collection of XML documents describing the store or site. There are two main parts to the repository:
- A description of the site components
- A description of all the configurable features available for the store
- Each element in the Flow Repository has a unique ID, so that it can be referenced by other elements in the repository as well as from other parts of WebSphere Commerce Flow, such as the Feature Selection File, Site Configuration File, custom JSP tags, and the user interface.
- Feature Selection File
- The Feature Selection File (FSF) contains the set of store or site features that have been enabled. The FSF is updated by the Flow user interface to capture the user's selections and represents a particular configuration of the store. Initially, the FSF contains the list of preselected features. The FSF is applied to the repository to generate the Site Configuration File.
- Site Configuration File
- The Site Configuration File (SCF) contains the minimum amount of information that is required to configure the store at run time. Namely, it contains the list of enabled features as well as the paths (URLs) for exit ports and file references. At run time, the Flow custom JSP tags only use the SCF to determine which portions of the store's JSP pages should be enabled or disabled and which paths should be used.
- Custom JSP tags
- The user's ability to configure store or site features through the user interface is accomplished by the WebSphere Commerce Flow custom JSP tags in the JSP files of the stores based on WebSphere Commerce starter stores.
- WebSphere Commerce Flow Repository: Site components
The WebSphere Commerce Flow Repository describes a set of JSP pages and the relationships among them. The JSP pages are grouped into the following abstract component hierarchy:
- WebSphere Commerce Flow Repository: Configurable features
The aspect of the Flow Repository that accounts for most uses of WebSphere Commerce Flow is the description of store or site's configurable features.
- WebSphere Commerce Flow custom JSP tags
The three WebSphere Commerce Flow custom tags are <ifEnabled>, <url>, and <fileRef>.
Related concepts
Storefront customization tools
Style configuration in WebSphere Commerce
Related tasks
Changing text in store pages and in notification messages