Name: Making Runtime Configuration Changes in Backoffice Framework in SAP Commerce Cloud
Uploaded: 2021-4-14
Duration: 360 s
Description: In this video, you will learn about how to make runtime changes within Backoffice Framework.To learn more about the configuration requirements and options for a specific widget, you can visit that widget's wiki page under Available Widgets.

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<div><div><div>In this video, you will learn about how to make runtime changes within Backoffice Framework.<br><br>To learn more about the configuration requirements and options for a specific widget,  you can visit that widget's wiki page under <a href="https://help.sap.com/viewer/5c9ea0c629214e42b727bf08800d8dfa/2011/en-US/8b5a00a2866910149de6d450109c80d1.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Available Widgets</a>.<br></div></div></div>

Making Runtime Configuration Changes in Backoffice Framework in SAP Commerce Cloud

Hi, my name is Lily. In this video, we're going to discuss how to make runtime changes within a back office framework application. We'll start off by looking at the visual representation of the widgets XML file. What you see on the screen is the Application Orchestrators symbolic widgets view within back office. This view is a mashup of our application represented in tree form. Think of it as a tree of widgets. This tree displays which widgets are used in the application. The widget hierarchy, which widgets are containers for other widgets, and the connections between widgets. In the default application orchestrator main view. You can also see how the widgets are laid out. As we mentioned previously, all of this information is stored in the global Widgets XML configuration, which can be viewed from within the application orchestrator. To view the content in the widgets XML view, I'll click on the menu icon in the upper right corner and then click on Show Widgets XML. As you can see, this file contains the XML representation of all the information that you just viewed with an application orchestrator. You can see the list of widgets, each denoted by a widget XML element. You can see how a widget is placed within the layout, denoted by whether it is nested inside another widget element and its slot id attribute. You can view the actual values of various widget settings at the bottom of the file. You can view any connections that have been configured between widgets. Remember that you cannot directly edit this file as it is read only. It is dynamically merged from multiple file system XML files to make runtime changes to this file. You can edit the desired applications mashup in the application orchestrator. Both the widgets XML file and the user interface will be dynamically updated. You can also make runtime updates to the Merge Widgets XML file by providing either application level or extension level widgets, XML files, and then selecting reset to default. This will cause the application to reload and merge all of the widget XML files in the application. Note that this will revert any changes to this file that were made within the application orchestrator. I'll close the widget XML file and switch our focus to making runtime configuration changes to the back office config XML file. Let's start by exiting the application orchestrator in order to view how part of the cockpit config XML is visually represented within the application. To do this, we will take a look at the Advanced search widget and note how it looks in a given context. That context being the selected type. Now let's select the product type to activate the advanced search widget. As you see, it has quite a few visible search attributes by default. Even more search attributes can be added. I'll change the configuration of this widget by just for the product type. I'll change it so that only the identifier appears on its default search attributes list. I'll also restrict it so that only the approval status can be added as an additional search attribute. To make these changes to the back office config XML. I'll enter the application orchestrator. I'll click on the menu icon in the upper right corner and select Show Cockpit Config XML. Notice that if you compare what you are seeing now to the widget XML file that we previously looked at, this file has the addition of a store button at the bottom. This is because the file is editable and can be saved to the database. Let's look at the configuration for the advanced search widget in the context of the product type. We can do this by opening the filter options and filtering first on advanced search under component, and then on product under type. To learn more about the configuration requirements and options for a specific widget, remember that you can visit the widgets wiki page under Available Widgets. For the purpose of simplifying this demonstration. Let's remove the XML responsible for merging this configuration. Merging is a topic that will be covered in another video. Now let's remove all of the advanced search field elements that we do not want to display for products. We will keep only the lines that refer to the identifier called name and the approval status fields. Note that the selected attribute specifies whether a field is displayed by default, or is only available as a potential additional search attribute to display. Now I'll save our updated config XML file back to the database by clicking store. A confirmation is requested to avoid any accidental saves. After the cockpit config XML has been saved and the page has reloaded, we can exit the application orchestrator and view the effects of our updates. I'll again select products and expand the advanced search. You can see now that only the identifier is visible on the search attributes list by default. If we want to add another search attribute, open the Add Criteria combo box. We can see that now the list only contains those attributes that we've specified in cockpit config, XML file identifier, and approval status. The other attributes are derived from generic item. Note that our configuration updates do not apply to the advanced search widget in any other context. For example, when any type other than product is selected. This is because we edited the switches configuration exclusively for the product context. This concludes our brief introduction to making runtime configuration changes in a back office framework application. Although this demonstration was based in the back office admin perspective, the process would be the same for any other cockpit view. Thanks for watching.