Product Advisor

The Product Advisor is a tool used to create an interactive online product catalog that provides customers with different ways of finding what they want, called shopping metaphors. Customers with little knowledge of a product category can use the Guided Sell metaphor, which guides them toward appropriate products through a series of questions and answers. Those with more knowledge can use the Product Exploration metaphor, which lets them select desired product features from a list. Once the selection has been narrowed down through either of the methods mentioned previously, customers can use the Product Comparison metaphor to compare similar products side by side. The Product Advisor checks each customer's entitlement, and only displays search results that the customer is entitled to view.

There are two search methods available for use with the Product Advisor. The first method requires additional tables added to the database to reformat existing product data to enable optimized parametric searches, which are focused on individual categories. This method is called the separate search space because the category and attribute information is separated from the base database tables. The second method is called the base search space because it has been designed to search the WebSphere Commerce database that is created during instance configuration. Both search spaces require some additional attribute metadata be populated in the Product Advisor tables in the database. Create search space using WebSphere Commerce Accelerator or using the scheduler commands. The Product Advisor includes scheduler commands to help automate the process of creating either search space. You must create an XML file to use as input to the scheduler command to meet your requirements.

Once you create the required search spaces, you can create metaphors form WebSphere Commerce Accelerator or using the scheduler commands.

If you use the separate search space, existing information in the database is copied and reformatted into separate tables specific to the search space. This reformatting means that updates to your product require that the information be propagated to the additional tables. This process is performed by the tools most commonly used to update product data, including the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, the Loader utility, and the messaging subsystem. If you update the product data using another method, you will have to call these commands manually. Refer to the command reference links listed below.