Develop > Presentation layer > Customize marketing > Marketing customization: Management Center > Customizing the Marketing tool to display catalog entry recommendations from an external system
Add support for external recommendations to the Management Center user interface
You can expose a prebuilt user interface that allows business users to define the criteria for displaying recommendations from external systems. By default, this user interface does not display in the Management Center Marketing tool because it is commented out in the code, but you can remove the comments. You might also need to customize the user interface to meet the business requirements.
Before you begin
Decide whether customize the prebuilt Display Recommendation from External System action element. Without customization, the properties view for the element looks like this:To use the prebuilt Display Recommendation from External System action element as is, expose it in the Activity Builder in the Marketing tool. This involves editing the properties view file for the Activity Builder so that the element displays in the palette. Business users can then drag the element from the palette into a Web activity and complete the properties shown in previous screen capture.
Customize the prebuilt action element requires additional work.
Procedure
- Open WebSphere Commerce Developer and switch to the Enterprise Explorer view.
- If required, customize the Display Recommendation from External System action element. For example:
- To add or remove widgets in the properties view, modify the mktDisplayExternalRecommendationProperties class in the original source file. This class is found here:
LOBTools/WebContent/WEB-INF/src/lzx/commerce/marketing/propertiesViews/activityBuilder/DisplayExternalRecommendationPropertiesView.lzx
- To customize the object definition for the element, modify the DisplayExternalRecommendationFlowElementObjectDefinition class in the original source file. This class is found here:
LOBTools/WebContent/WEB-INF/src/lzx/commerce/marketing/objectDefinitions/activityBuilder/DisplayExternalRecommendationFlowElementObjectDefinition.lzx
Your customization might require additional changes. The topics linked from Add a new trigger, target or action provide useful reference information about the code that supports action elements in the Marketing tool.
- Expose the prebuilt Display Recommendation from External System action element in the Activity Builder for the Marketing tool:
- In the Enterprise Explorer view, expand LOBTools > WebContent > WEB-INF > src > lzx > commerce > marketing > propertiesViews.
- Open the WebActivityBuilder.lzx properties view file. This properties view contains the palette for Web activities.
- In the properties view file, locate the following line of code:
<Element objectType="displayExternalRecommendation"/>
- Remove the comments so the line is no longer commented out.
- Save and close the file.
- If you want business users to be able to create Web activity templates using the Display Recommendation from External System action element, repeat steps 3.b through 3.e for the WebActivityTemplateBuilder.lzx file . This properties view contains the palette for Web activity templates.
What to do next
After you complete the customization:
- Right-click LOBTools Project; then click Build OpenLaszlo Project to produce an updated ManagementCenter.swf file under the workspace_dir\LOBTools\WebContent directory. This is the default environment setting.
- Test the changes by viewing them in the Management Center, using this URL: https://hostname:8000/lobtools.
- Deploy your changes to the production environment.
Previous topic: Create the task command to retrieve external recommendations
Related concepts
Action: Display Recommendation From External System
Related tasks
Add a new trigger, target or action