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Storefront customization tools
WebSphere Commerce Accelerator provides tools to change various elements of the storefront, such as the store or site's logo, flow, text, and style. WebSphere Commerce starter stores, showcase many such configurable elements. Depending on the needs of the store or site, the store developer can make additional choices for flow, text, and style available to the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator tools by modifying the store or site's storefront assets. This section provides background information necessary to understand runtime storefront configuration and describes the JSP page and configuration file changes needed to enable additional choices for flow, text, and style.
A common customization scenario is a host (for instance, an ISP) or an enterprise (for instance, a franchise owner) providing additional flow or style options for their stores or Extended Sites. The information contained in this section should thus be especially useful in the context of the Extended Sites business model.
To be applicable across the editions of WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Commerce Developer, the instructions outlined in this section are based on customization of a consumer direct store. These instructions, however, translate to the multiple-site scenarios by performing customization on appropriate storefront asset stores, such as the consumer direct storefront asset store in the extended site scenario or the B2B direct reseller storefront asset store in the demand chain scenario.
- 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.
- Style configuration in WebSphere Commerce
WebSphere Commerce provides the capability to dynamically change the look and feel of stores that are based on WebSphere Commerce starter stores by varying style-color-banner combinations. This capability is realized through the Change Style wizard, which relies on the WebSphere Commerce Flow infrastructure.
- Configure a Web application
All major aspects of a Web application are configured declaratively by means of Struts configuration files. Action-mappings, global-forwards, message-resources, data-sources, form-beans, global-exceptions, and so forth, are among key elements found in Struts configuration files. (Refer to the Struts User Guide for the complete list and details.) Of these, WebSphere Commerce extends the semantics for action-mappings, global-forwards, and message-resources.
- Customize the Web application configuration
To customize the configuration of the WCS instance, edit the WebSphere Commerce Struts custom configuration files, struts-config-ext.xml, which are included in each of the WebSphere Commerce Web modules. Confining customization to these files, in place of struts-config.xml, will ensure that the customizations are not overwritten during subsequent migration, fix pack installation, and other similar activities.
- Update the Web application configuration
You have two options for updating the WebSphere Commerce Struts configuration while the WebSphere Commerce application is running.
- JSP pages and data beans
A data bean is a Java bean that is used within a JSP page to provide dynamic content. A data bean normally provides a simple representation of a WebSphere Commerce entity bean. The data bean encapsulates properties that can be retrieved from or set within the entity bean. As such, the data bean simplifies the task of incorporating dynamic data into JSP pages.
Related concepts
WebSphere Commerce Flow infrastructure
Style configuration in WebSphere Commerce
WebSphere Commerce Accelerator
Related tasks
Changing text in store pages and in notification messages
Related information
Tutorial: Adding a new Change Flow feature
Tutorial: Adding style options