|
|
2.6 WebSphere Commerce flow infrastructureWebSphere 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 UI, 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 visible immediately by simply refreshing the store pages in the Web browser. Figure 2-8 illustrates the basic infrastructure of and interaction within and without WebSphere Commerce Flow, which are detailed in this section.
Figure 2-8 WebSphere Commerce flow The main components of WebSphere Commerce Flow are:
The Flow Repository is a collection of XML documents describing the store or site. There are two main parts to the repository:
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 UI.
The Feature Selection File (FSF) contains the set of store or site features that have been enabled. The FSF is updated by the Flow UI 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.
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.
The user's ability to configure store or site features through the UI is accomplished by the WebSphere Commerce Flow custom JSP tags in the JSP files of the stores based on WebSphere Commerce starter stores. |
A description of the site components
 ibm.com/redbooks |