Promotion agenda builder considerations

When the promotion engine is invoked, an agenda builder is first used to determine the active promotions for an order. The specific promotion agenda builder the site uses and the number of active promotions for the site can affect the performance of the promotion evaluation process. To help improve the promotion evaluation process, we can change the setting for the promotion agenda builder. Changing these settings can ensure that the site uses the appropriate agenda builder and improve the performance of the agenda builder used. When we are changing these settings, consider the following tips:

• Limit the number of promotions to be evaluated for an order by deactivating or removing unneeded promotions. By limiting the number of active promotions, we can reduce the total promotion evaluation time and reduce the effect on performance from order calculation tasks.

• Ensure that the appropriate agenda builder is used. The following table details when to use a specific PromotionExecutionAgendaBuilder in the site:

  Agenda builder usage considerations

  PromotionExecutionAgendaBuilder	When to use it	When not to use it
  ShopcartDrivenAgendaBuilder	Recommended for most sites Your store relies on catalog-promotion data that is populated by Management Center for default promotion types Your store has customized promotion types or promotions that are directly loaded into the store database. If the store has these promotions or promotion types, the CATENCALCD and CATGPCALCD tables must be populated according to the promotion rules	A different AgendaBuilder is more suitable Your store catalog-promotion data is not populated in the database by customization or data load.
  DefaultAgendaBuilder	Your site does not require extended site support Your store has only a few active promotions Your promotion engine evaluates all active promotions for the store.	Your site has many active promotions Your site requires extended site support
  StorePathSupportedAgendaBuilder	Your site requires extended site support Your store has only a few active promotions Your promotion engine evaluates all active promotions for the store.	Your site has many active promotions
  CodeDrivenAgendaBuilder	All promotions for the site require a shopper to enter a promotion code	Your site has a promotion that does not require a shopper to enter a promotion code

We can also implement a custom PromotionExecutionAgendaBuilder for the store and configure this builder to work with the promotion engine. To use a custom agenda builder, modify the PromotionExecutionAgendaBuilder section to change the implementation class for the builder in your promotion engine configuration file. The configuration file is in the following directory:

• workspace_dir\WC\xml\PromotionEngineConfiguration\WCSPromotionEngineConfig.xml

If the store uses promotions that are created and updated only with Management Center, we can improve the agenda builder performance by disabling the unnecessary SQL queries. For more information about disabling these queries, see Disable unused queries for the shopping cart agenda builder

Related reference
Promotion performance tuning