Name: Setting Up Fallback Strategies in Backoffice Framework in SAP Commerce Cloud
Uploaded: 2021-3-26
Duration: 352 s
Description: In this video, you'll learn about Fallback Strategies in Backoffice Framework and know what to do when there's no configuration defined for a specific widget instance.

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<div><div>In this video, you'll learn about Fallback Strategies in Backoffice Framework and know what to do when there's no configuration defined for a specific widget instance.</div></div>

Setting Up Fallback Strategies in Backoffice Framework in SAP Commerce Cloud

Hi, my name is Lily. In this video, I'll discuss configuration fallback strategies. We've seen that widgets utilize a user interface configuration from the cockpit config XML file in order to display content in various contexts. For example, when a product listing is displayed, the ListView widget needs to know what product attributes can be included on the list. Let's consider a scenario where there's no configuration defined for a specific context of a widget instance. Let's say that ListView widgets user interface has been configured for the type product. What happens when the same widget instance is then expected to display a user? It's not ideal when the administrator or developer is expected to provide configurations for every possible context for a widget, or ask, was the user seeing an error message or blank widget? The back office framework takes care of this scenario by providing a default fallback mechanism for each widgets. User interface. Configuration. This fallback mechanism is called the UI configuration fallback. The UI configuration fallbacks. Primary responsibility is to make sure that content is displayed within a widget, even if no user interface configuration is available for the widget. For a specific context such as type, component, or principal, it will generate a basic configuration for the widget dynamically. The generated fallback configuration isn't persistent, but is kept in memory. It's the responsibility of the widget developer to provide a fallback strategy for the generation of this configuration. The widget developer can also provide multiple strategies for a user interface. Context configuration. The UI configuration fallback will iterate through the list of strategies until it finds one that doesn't return a null value. Here's a high level overview of how to set up a fallback strategy for a widget. In this case, we're using the advanced search widget for the widget. We first have to create the default advanced search configuration fallback strategy class second. Our fallback strategy class is required to implement the cockpit configuration fallback strategy interface. This interface has only one method load fallback configuration. This method will be executed if no configuration was found for the widget. For a specific context. This strategy that we've implemented within the load fallback configuration method produces a configuration with all searchable fields that are available for a given type. Then, as we should know well, we need to create a spring bean within our spring context XML file. Instantiating the Java class we written for the fallback strategy. Finally, we need to register our fallback strategy in the configuration. As you can see here, the fallback strategy gets registered within the cockpit configuration service extender bean in its property map called Fallback Strategies. Now I'll show you an example of a fallback strategy getting triggered within the back office application. First, a reminder of what the Advanced Storage widget instance looks like when its user interface configuration comes from the cockpit config XML file. I'll click catalog and then products to select the type, and then click the Advanced Search widget icon. As you can see, there are several fields available for performing the advanced search operation on products. Now switch to orchestrator mode and select Show Cockpit Config XML. I'm going to remove the whole user interface context configuration, so there's no doubt that fallback strategies will get used extensively. This means that every widget instance in the application will use its fallback strategy, including the advanced search list view and editor area instances. I'll replace the previous user interface configuration with this configuration snippet. The configuration snippet specifies one single user interface context configured, so the exploratory will display only the product type. I'll save and exit orchestrator mode. Let's see what happens when the Advanced Search widget instance is asked to display criteria fields for the product type. I'll select the product node in the exploratory widget instance. You can see that it's still possible to perform an advanced search on products because of the specified fallback strategy. A user interface configuration for the widget has been dynamically generated that allows us to specify search criteria for the product type. Now let's look at the list view again. Even though there was no user interface configuration specified for this widget, in the cockpit config XML file, there's still a user interface that has been generated for this widget based on its specified fallback strategy. I'll select an item from the list. The editor area widget instance displays detailed information about the item based on its fallback strategy. As you can see with minimal configuration, our application is still operational because of fallback strategies. While we wrote the cockpit config XML back to its default configuration by selecting reset defaults. When we exit orchestrator mode, everything is as usual. In this video I discuss configuration fallback strategies. Thanks for watching.