Common business tasks and their impact to the WebSphere Commerce Search index

There are impacts to the search index when certain business tasks are performed. Ensure that we are aware of your daily tasks when they might require search index rebuilds.

General guidelines

Certain business tasks might introduce a significant impact to the production system. This is due to certain changes that trigger a full reindexing, which might vary in time from several minutes to hours, depending on the catalog size. The following general guidelines highlight the business actions that we can perform during business hours, and those to avoid: Perform the following business actions during business hours, as they do not pose a significant risk to production system performance:

• Creating a sales catalog that results in adding new categories only.

• Updating an existing category property.

• Changes made to any new or existing products, SKUs, packages, or bundles.

• Product attachments should be updated with their associated products.

• Adding or updating attribute dictionary attributes.

• Updating default price lists for any product.

• Adding or updating any type of marketing activity. For example, Web activities, Dialog activities, or search rules.

• Adding or updating search term associations.

• Committing or canceling any task groups.

• Undoing any uncommitted operations within tasks.

Avoid performing the following business actions during business hours, as they might affect performance to the production system:

• Reparenting an existing category. This triggers a full reindexing, which is not suitable during business hours where the system usage is high.

• Removing an existing category or a subcategory from a catalog. This triggers a full reindexing, which is not suitable during business hours where the system usage is high.

• Individual attachments should not be reloaded or deleted separately. This operation must be performed with an associated product.

Warning: By default, the updateSearchIndex scheduled job runs a full index update. Do not run the updateSearchIndex scheduled job in any full index configurations on a production environment.

The inventory index contains operational data and therefore can be used only for previewing in an authoring environment. IT administrators can set up a recurring task to take snapshots of inventory status from a production environment and use them in an authoring environment for previewing, testing, and tuning of search rules.

Common business tasks that affect the search index

The following table highlights the common business tasks and their impact to the search index in an authoring or staging environment, where:

• An authoring environment is one that has a workspace that is enabled and business users can use this environment to perform changes within a workspace. Once the workspace gets approved, committed data (from the base schema) can be reindexed and then published to the production environment through index replication.

• A staging environment is similar to an authoring environment, with the exception that it does not have workspace that is enabled. Business users can still make changes in this staging environment, but changes are made immediately to the search index in this staging environment.

Note: All reindexing types listed in the table are denoted against the product index and not the category index, except where indicated (Category business component).

Business tasks that affect the search index

Business component	Business task	Reindexing type
Catalog: master or sales catalog	Linking or unlinking to an existing category from a catalog tree	Delta: Product and Category index Note: A delta reindex is performed only if the number of changes that are affected by the business task is less than the DeltaIndexingThreshold threshold.
	Changes to an association of existing product to a catalog	Delta: Product index
Store: direct business model	Adding a new stand-alone direct model store that uses a separate master catalog	Full: All indexes
Store: extended business model	Adding a new extended site that uses an existing indexed catalog asset store	Not required
	Adding a product, or delete an existing product from an existing extended site	Delta: Product index
Catalog entry: product, package, bundle, kit, item	Adds a product, or delete an existing product	Delta: Product index
	Updates any existing property or adds a property to an existing catalog entry, such as the product description, product name, brand name, thumbnail, images, SKU	Delta: Product index
	Updates any existing or adds new package or bundle	Delta: Product index
	Associating or removing a product attribute from an existing product	Delta: Product index
	Reparent a catalog entry	Delta: Product index
Category	Adds a category	Delta: Category index
	Deletes an existing category	Full
	Updates any existing property or adds a property to an existing category, such as the category description, thumbnail, images	Delta: Category index
	Reparent a category	Delta: Product and Category index
Merchandising association	Updates or adds new merchandising association	Not required
Attribute Dictionary attributes	Adding or removing any value of a newly created product attribute in the attribute dictionary	Not required
	Updates to any value of an existing attribute in the attribute dictionary associated with products.	Delta: Product index
	Updates made to an associated catalog entry's Attribute Dictionary attributes or their allowed values.	Delta: Product index
Attributes	Updates to any value of a newly created or existing product attribute	Delta: Product index
	Adding or removing any value of an existing product attribute	Delta: Product index
	Adding or removing a product attribute	Delta: Product index
Associated asset	Uploads a new attachment and associates with an existing product	Delta: Product and Unstructured index
	Reuploads or deletes an existing attachment associated with only one product	Delta: Product and Unstructured index
	Reuploads or deletes an existing attachment associated with existing products	Delta: Product and Unstructured index
Price	Updates to any existing or adds a new (default) price rule to a store	Delta: Product index
	Updates to store default offer price for a product	Delta: Product index
	Updates to list price for a product	Not required
Contract	Creating or changing a contract using Catalog Filter from within the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.	Full
Marketing	(Professional) (Enterprise) Adding, changing, or deleting an existing marketing activity (Web, Dialog)	Not required
Search rule	Adding, changing, or deleting an existing search rule	Not required
Search term association	Adding, changing, or deleting an existing search term association	Not required
Versioning	Rollback or forward to another version of a category	Delta: Product and Category index
	Rollback or forward to another version of a product	Delta: Product index
Inventory	Updates to the inventory search index	Full: Inventory index

Common business tasks that affect the search index with workspaces enabled

The following table highlights the available index types for approved content (base) and workspaces.All reindexing types listed in the table are denoted against the following indexes:

Index types

Index type	Approved Content (base)	Workspace
Product index	X	X
Category index	X	X
Unstructured index	X	X

The following table highlights the common business tasks and their impact to the search index in an environment with workspaces:

Note: Upon approving a task group that contains catalog changes:

• Indexing is triggered against the base schema to index the workspace changes under the Approved content index, and

• Indexing is required against the workspace schema to clean up the approved changes from the workspace index.

Business tasks that affect the search index

Business component	Business task	Reindexing type
		Approved Content	Workspace
Catalog: master or sales catalog	Linking or unlinking to an existing subcategory from a catalog tree	Delta: Product and Category index	Delta: Product and Category index
	Linking or unlinking for a top category	Full: All indexes	Full: All indexes
	Changes to an association of existing product to a catalog	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
	Create Sales Catalog	Not required	Not required
	Update Catalog description	Not required	Not required
	Update default Catalog	Not required	Not required
Store: direct business model	Adding a new stand-alone direct model store that uses a separate master catalog	Full: All indexes	Full: All indexes
Store: extended business model	Adding a new Extended Site that uses an existing indexed catalog asset store	Not required	Not required
	Adding a product, or delete an existing product from an existing Extended Site	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
Catalog entry: product, package, bundle, kit, item	Adding a product, or delete an existing product	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
	Updating any existing property or adding a property to an existing catalog entry, such as the product description, product name, brand name, thumbnail, images, SKU	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
	Updating any existing or adding a package or bundle	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
	Associating or removing a product attribute from an existing product	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
	Reparenting a catalog entry	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
	Updating the sequence of a catalog entry within a category	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
	Unpublish a product (Display to customer not selected in the Management Center)	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
Category	Adding a subcategory to an existing category	Delta: Category index	Delta: Category index
	Deleting a subcategory from an existing category	Full: All indexes	Full
	Updating any existing property or adding a property to an existing category, such as the category description, thumbnail, images	Delta: Category index	Delta: Category index
	Reparenting a category	Delta: Product and Category index	Delta: Product and Category index
	Updating the sequence of a sales category when Expanded Category Navigation is disabled	Delta: Category index	Delta: Category index
	Updating the sequence of a sales category when Expanded Category Navigation is enabled	Delta: Product and Category index	Delta: Product and Category index
	Unpublish a category (Display to customer not selected in the Management Center)	Delta: Category index	Delta: Category index
	Unpublish a category (Display to customer not selected in the Management Center) when deep category unpublish is enabled	Full: Product and Category index	Full: Product and Category index
Merchandising association	Updating or adding new merchandising associations	Not required	Not required
Attribute Dictionary attributes	Adding a value to an existing attribute dictionary attribute	Not required	Not required
	Updating or removing any value of an existing attribute in the attribute dictionary associated with products	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
	Adding an attribute dictionary attribute	Not required	Not required
	Marking an attribute dictionary attribute as searchable or facetable	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
	Removing an attribute dictionary attribute	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
Attributes	Updates to any value of a newly created or existing product attribute	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
	Adding or removing any value of an existing product attribute	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
	Adding or removing a product attribute	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
Associated asset	Uploading a new attachment and associating it with an existing product	Delta: Product and Unstructured index	Delta: Product and Unstructured index
	Uploading or deleting an existing attachment associated with one or more products Note: We must also update the product	Delta: Product and Unstructured index	Delta: Product and Unstructured index
Price	Updates to default store offer price for a product	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
Contract	Creating or changing a contract using Catalog Filter from within the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.	Full: All indexes	Full: All indexes
Marketing	Adding, changing, or deleting an existing Web or Dialog activity (Professional) (Enterprise) Dialog activities are available only in the Professional and Enterprise editions of WebSphere Commerce.	Not required	Not required
Search rule	Adding, changing, or deleting an existing search rule	Not required	Not required
Search term association	Adding, changing, or deleting an existing search term association	Not required	Not required
Versioning	Rollback or forward to another version of a category	Delta: Product and Category index	Delta: Product and Category index
	Rollback or forward to another version of a product	Delta: Product index	Delta: Product index
Inventory	Updates to the inventory search index	Full: Inventory index	Full: Inventory index

Example: Reading a table row for common business tasks

• When a business user is working on a workspace schema and creating a new product in the Catalogs tool, a delta reindexing is required to update the workspace product index.