Oracle acquired “Art technology Group” in early 2011 as a move to feature in the retail services market. But the search capabilities provided by ATG (viz. ATG search) was not up to the standards and most of the ATG customers had been using Endeca for the search capabilities. So as part of its aggressive market strategy, Oracle bought Endeca technologies in late 2011 so as to make use of the Enterprise search software with ATG and eventually replaced the ATG search with Endeca from version 10.1.1 of Oracle ATG.
There is seamless integration that has been envisioned in ATG for the Endeca. A new module has been developed in ATG named ‘Endeca’. This module when included using the application’s MANIFEST.MF file of the application helps the developer to use the Endeca features like baseline updates , product attributes modification, application preview etc. on the fingertips.
There are two aspects of this integration:
Updating MDEX
Accessing MDEX
Both these operations can be easily performed from the ATG side itself, once the integration implementation is done.
Updating MDEX: The changes performed on the web commerce catalog (sku data) can be indexed and transferred to the MDEX from ATG in two ways:
- Manually through /atg/endeca/index/admin/SimpleIndexingAdmin component. This can be done from the dyn-admin (which is a web based ATG application used to make runtime changes to the attributes of ATG components and more. see the image below) Once we manually start the process , various sub-processes run in parallel as threads to run the baseline index.
- Automatically by deploying an application on ATG-BCC. BCC is a tool used by Business Users for various business tasks and each task (say change in catalog) goes as an application deployment in BCC (see the image below).Once the deployment is finished, the baseline update is executed automatically. Hence this makes sure that whenever the ATG catalog is updated, the records get indexed and go and sit in MDEX
Accessing MDEX:
I already discussed that an ‘Endeca’ module is also provided within latest ATG installations. This module has various APIs– including assembler APIs (helps to manage dynamic content retrieval) and presentation APIs (helps to manage search and navigation result retrieval) – needed to connect to Endeca application and access the MDEX. In addition to this new ATG droplets like invokeAssember have been introduced OOTB that makes the records retrieval and manipulation relatively easier.
The Oracle is coupling ATG more and more with Endeca, the Endeca still can be used with any java and .NET based framework directly through APIs and with any other framework through web service calls.
