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WebSphere Commerce Portal user classification
There are three main types of users in a WebSphere Commerce store: registered shoppers, guest shoppers, and generic users.
- A registered shopper is a returning user to the system where the shopper's profile has already been registered on the WebSphere Commerce system even before the system authenticates this user.
- A guest shopper, however, is a temporary registered WebSphere Commerce user where the shopper's profile is created at the time when an anonymous user adds an item to the WebSphere Commerce shopping cart. Details of the guest shopper profile is entered as the shopper completes the order. Guest shopper accounts cannot be reused after the user's Web browser session has been terminated. A guest shopper is a temporary WebSphere Commerce user account where its sole purpose is to help the system track the anonymous user's order.
- A generic user is an anonymous user where the system does not require any tracking of user-specific information.
This same user concept can also be reused for the WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Commerce integration. WebSphere Portal users are required to authenticate using the WebSphere Portal server. Once the user has been authenticated, WebSphere Portal issues an LTPA token to the HTTP session that the portal user can use for accessing all authenticated services in the portal Web site. The first time an authenticated user tries to access a WebSphere Commerce portlet, the WebSphere Commerce portlet performs a single sign on operation against WebSphere Commerce for this particular portal user, using the credential stored in the user's session. This single sign on WebSphere Commerce session is stored with the Portal user and is reused for future WebSphere Commerce requests until the given identity token, such as the LTPA token, expires.
When a shopper adds an item to the shopping cart, although the master record of the shopping cart content is maintained in the WebSphere Commerce server, the shopper's portlet session is assigned an identity token that can uniquely identify the user's current shopping cart and all its associated order related activities. The shopper's session is therefore synonymously referred as the user's shopping cart. As a guest shopper authenticates through the Portal interface, the shopper's current session, with all its related order items, is transferred to its registered shopper account. This process is known as cart migration. That is, cart migration converts the guest shopper's shopping cart into the authenticated registered shopper's current pending order. If the registered shopper already has one or more pending orders before authentication occurs, those pending orders are not affected. Only the newly migrated shopping cart becomes the registered shopper's current pending order.
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