Name: Creating Custom Promotion Actions in SAP Commerce Cloud
Uploaded: 2024-9-3
Duration: 536 s
Description: In this video, you will receive an overview of how the promotion engine functions and learn how to create custom promotion actions following best practices.

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<div><div><div><div>In this video, you will receive an overview of how the promotion engine functions and learn how to create custom promotion actions following best practices.</div></div></div></div>

Creating Custom Promotion Actions in SAP Commerce Cloud

Hello! In this topic, we will discuss how to develop a new action type that will be used to create a promotion rule. First, let’s review the basic knowledge of the promotion engine. SAP Commerce Cloud contains  an out-of-the-box promotion engine, it offers a user interface for creating and managing promotions that  run on your storefront. The promotion engine is based on a rule engine that can simplify complex decision-making logic into user-defined rules using ready-to-use commerce business objects such as  products, carts, and customers. Each promotion rule is composed  of a list of conditions and actions. When all conditions are met, the corresponding list of actions will be triggered. For example, if the total amount of your shopping cart is equal to or greater than $100, the customer can enjoy a 10% discount  for the current order. Currently, the SAP Commerce Cloud promotion engine provides a list of predefined conditions and actions that we can directly use  to define various promotion rules. This diagram shows a conceptual  architecture of the promotion engine. It is clear that the promotion engine will utilize two important components  in the underlying rule engine. The first component is the rule builder, which allows people to create and manage user-friendly source promotion  rules in the back office. The second component is the rule compiler, which is used to compile source promotion rules into executable promotion rules,  which are also called Drools rules. These Drools rules are then evaluated and triggered by the underlying Drools engine. SAP Commerce rule engine  is based on the Drools engine. Both source promotion rules and Drools rules will be saved in the SAP  Commerce Cloud database. Just as the SAP Commerce platform uses a type system to represent internal state, the Promotion Engine and Rule Engine use rule-aware objects (RAOs) to provide the facts required to evaluate rules and apply actions. Rule-Aware Objects (a.k.a. RAOs) refer to the predefined and extensible  set of plain old Java objects. SAP Commerce Cloud has introduced a standard set of promotion RAOs, including CartRAO, UserRAO,  and CouponRAO. Additionally, you can define new RAO types. With these key points in mind, it’s time to talk about how to develop a customized promotion action in detail. Normally, it contains five steps: Step 1: Define or extend action RAO bean. Step 2: Define or extend action item type. Step 3: Implement the action  to handle the action RAO bean. At runtime, as a promotion rule is triggered by the underlying Drools engine,  any related actions will be executed. The major duties of the action  RAO bean include: Create/update specific action RAO. Add the created/updated RAO  into the rule-engine result RAO. Step 4: Implement the action  strategy to handle the action item. For each action, there is  a corresponding strategy class, which will be invoked to apply and persist the promotion rule result  from RAO bean instances. Step 5: Make the newly developed  action available in Backoffice. Next, let's check out a demo for developing a customized promotional action to add a promoted user to a specific user group. Please ensure that you have created a custom extension to contain your implementation. For example, I have created the "trainingpromotionaction"  extension in my system. This is where I will add the related implementation for the custom action. As the first step, we need to create  a new Action RAO bean ChangeUserGroupRAO in  resources/-beans.xml. The new ChangeUserGroupRAO bean  that we want to define needs to extend AbstractRuleActionRAO  and will require a userGroupId attribute, which is used to indicate the userGroup to which the user will be added.  Step 2, since we finally need to synchronize the promotion result from the Drools engine to the SAP Commerce platform, a corresponding Action item type should be defined in -items.xml to store the properties needed for the action. In this case, the RuleBasedAddUserToUserGroupAction type is defined, which extends from the AbstractRuleBasedPromotionAction type and has two properties: User and Usergroup.  Run "ant all".  Then run "ant updatesystem" to update the SAP Commerce type system  with the newly declared item type.  Step 3, we need to implement an RAO Action Java class to handle your promotion action, using the newly created RAO as data. Please note that the method performAction() will be executed as a Drools rule action. This method creates a new instance of ChangeUserGroupRAO and a new instance of UserGroupRAO based on the userGroupCode, adds the current UserRAO to this UserGroupRAO, and ensures that new and changed facts are added to the Rule-Engine working memory.  Furthermore, inside resources/-spring.xml, define Spring beans for AddUserToUserGroupRAOAction and the corresponding DefaultRuleExecutableAction.  Step 4, we will implement the DefaultAddUserToUserGroupActionStrategy with two callback methods:  apply()  responsible for executing our ChangeUserGroupRAO action.  In the context of this demo, by the time this method is called, it has already been determined that the promotion  action should be applied, meaning the customer should be added to the specified user group.  Additionally, this action handler also takes care of creating both the PromotionResultModel and the related RuleBasedAddUserToUserGroupActionModel. undo() - responsible for undoing or reversing what apply() has done. In this scenario, it means removing  the user from the user group. Do not forget to define a Spring bean for DefaultAddUserToUserGroupActionStrategy. We also need to add our  new ActionStrategy bean “defaultAddUserToUserGroupActionStrategy” to the existing list of action strategies, and associate it with its related RAOAction by adding a map entry to the promotionActionStrategiesMapping. The key in this case is the name  of our RAOAction bean, “defaultAddUserToUserGroupRAOAction”, and the value is the id of  our new ActionStrategy bean “defaultAddUserToUserGroupActionStrategy”. Then rebuild your platform by executing ant all from the hybris/bin/platform directory to compile all the new Java code.  Step 5, in order to use our new promotional action in the promotion rule  builder in Backoffice, we need to create an instance of the action object and its parameters (if there are any), and then map the action object  to the promotion source rule type. As a real technical expert in commerce, it’s always a good practice  to use ImpEx, isn't it? That way, we can import this ImpEx script to SAP Commerce Cloud.  Now you can log in to Backoffice  with the admin user,  navigate to Marketing, Promotion Rules,  create a new promotion rule,  open it for editing,  and access the Conditions & Actions tab.  Here, you will find the "Add customer to group" action available under  the Available Actions section!  Those are the 5 steps for creating a custom promotion action, thank you for watching!