Demonstrating an Industry Standard Search Solution

Demonstrating an Industry Standard Search Solution

IBM WebSphere Commerce is now a fully operational search engine.
The product now includes Lucene Solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) as the internal search engine, thus not only leveraging open standards, also incorporates industry best practices.

With that, you will probably benefit to enable the IBM WebSphere Commerce search capability in a starter store, so that you can get a good idea what is available out-of-the-box with the product.

Here is a link to the IBM WebSphere Commerce information center documentation regarding WebSphere Commerce search:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wchelp/v7r0m0/topic/com.ibm.commerce.developer.doc/concepts/csdsearch.htm

At a high level, WebSphere Commerce search provides the following key business benefits:

• It is built on the top of open architecture.
• It contains a rich set of search functionality for shoppers in starter stores.
• It provides integrated search management tooling for business users in the Management Center.
• It lowers the total cost of deployment and ownership, since its functionality is included as a feature of WebSphere Commerce.

In regards to starter stores, here is a link to the IBM WebSphere Commerce information center to summarize what is available-to-market in the product:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wchelp/v7r0m0/topic/com.ibm.commerce.starterstores.doc/concepts/csmsearch.htm

This blog entry covers the steps required to enable search for a starter store.

This is where you should start to understand how to setup search for a starer store:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wchelp/v7r0m0/topic/com.ibm.commerce.starterstores.doc/refs/rsdfepfeatroadmap.htm

As a side note to this link, I was only able to install Feature Pack 2, due to limited resource access, but I still brought IBM WebSphere Commerce up to Fix Pack level 5 (WCS v7.0.0.5).

The following list of steps is the procedure that I took in order to enable a fully integrated search solution into a demonstrable starter store:

1. Install "WebSphere Commerce Developer Enterprise" version 7
2. Update "WebSphere Commerce Developer Enterprise" to version 7.0.0.5
3. Install "Feature Pack 2" (preferably feature pack 3 or higher)
4. Enable the Store Enhancement Features
1. cd 'WCDE_installdir'\bin
2. enableFeature.bat -DfeatureName=store-enhancements
5. Publish the Madisons Feature Pack Store Archive:
1. Publish Madisons-FEP.sar
6. Enable the Solr foundation
1. cd 'WCDE_installdir'\bin
2. enableFeature.bat -DfeatureName=foundation [DsolrHome=C:\IBM\WCDE_ENT70\search\solr\home]
7. Setup the Search Index:
1. cd 'WCDE_installdir'\components\foundation\subcomponents\search\bin
2. setupSearchIndex.bat -masterCatalogId 10001 -instance WCDE_ENT70 -dbuser db2admin -dbuserpwd db2admin [-solrhome C:\IBM\WCDE_ENT70\search\solr\home]
8. Preprocess the Search index:
1. cd WCDE_installdir\bin
2. di-preprocess.bat C:\IBM\WCDE_ENT70\search\pre-processConfig\MC_10001\DB2\ [-fullbuild true] [-localename en_US]
9. Test the current Solr index to ensure that a request can be recognized:
1. http://host_name/solr/Default/select?q=*%3A*
10. Build out the index (first make sure to start the test server in toolkit):
1. cd 'WCDE_installdir'\bin
2. di-buildindex.bat -masterCatalogId 10001 
11. Test the indexed Solr index to ensure results are returning:
1. http://localhost/solr/MC_10001_CatalogEntry_en_US/select?q=catentry_id:10251
12. Enable the store to display the search breadcrumb and faceting filters:
1. Open Management Center
2. Click "Management Center Tools" menu and select "Store Management"
3. Select the "Madisons" store and click the "Catalog" tab
4. check "Search-based navigation"
5. click Save
13. Test live on the starter store:
1. http://localhost/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Madisons/index.jsp
2. http://localhost/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Elite/index.jsp