Websphere Commerce Product Recommendations

I am trying to configure an activity to display products based on the selected categories. For example if there is an espot E1, then I need to create an activity which associates a category (C1) with this espot and displays random product from this category to the espot.

Any suggestions on how to achieve this ? I am using version 6.0 of websphere commerce where part of the functionality is in Accelerator and part in management centre. Its kind of wiered.

Well.. I found out that websphere commerce doesn't have the capability to recommend products on a merketing spot if I associate a category to an eSpot. This is a basic functionality which I thought should be out of the box. However, I have figured out a way to do it. Just display the categories in the ESpot and based on the category ID, write custom code in the JSP to fetch all the products from the category and display the espot as requried.

I also figured out that the web activity can be defined using both accelerator and management centre. When we define a webactivity in accelerator, the activity goes into INITIATIVE and INTVSCHD tables of WCS. On the other hand, when a web activity is configured using management centre, they are stored in DMACTIVITY table.

Overview of Websphere Commerce eMarketing Spots (emspot)

ESpots are specific defined areas on a JSP page whose content can be dynamically configured based on rules. Since websphere commerce version 6.0 and Feature pack 3 onwards, management centre feature can be used to manage ESpots, activities, catalog, and other marketing activities.

Introduced in feature pack 3, eSpot is created in management centre and the websphere commerce tables which are affected are as below

Emarketing Spots are stored in a table named EMSPOT with EMSPOT_ID (system generated), STOREENT_ID (store for which emarketing spot is created) and NAME (name of the emarketing spot) being the unique keys for the table.

There is a field SUPPORTEDTYPES which defines, as the name implies, supported types of things that can be displayed on an emarketing spot. In version 6.0 of wcs,

The types of things that this e-Marketing Spot can display:

A = Awareness ad

P = Product

C = Category

S = Cross-sell or Up-sell on product.

G = General content, which corresponds to a content spot. This value should only be used by the system.

Web activities are defined as rules to display targeted marketing content to customers in predefined e-Marketing Spots. If multiple web activities are configured to display different content on the same marketing spot, then the priority of the web-activity comes into picture.

DMACTIVITY is the table which holds the activity data. DMACTTYPE_ID defines the type of the activity. 0 is default for a web-activity. STOREENT_ID is the store with which activity is associated. STARTDATE and ENDDATE specifies dates between which the web activity is active. STATE field defines whether an activity is active or not.

DMELEMENT holds the details of the campaign elements associated with a marketing activity.

DMELEMENTNVP holds the name value pairs for each of the direct marketing element.

DMELEMENT_ID                 NAME                                                             VALUE                                    TRIGGERMATCH

10,512             collateralIdList             10463              0         

10,513             name                           rootPath          0

10,514             emsId                          10414              1

The collateralIdList specifies what the actual collateral to display is. This is contained in a table COLLATERAL