Object Support for Recommendations

Commerce Server provides a wide variety for object support for the various types of recommendations that can be built into a retail Web site. Each of the previously categorized types of recommendations are addressed in turn.

Object Support for Cross Sells and Up Sells

Adding cross sells and/or up sells to a retail Web site consists of defining the appropriate relationships between products, or categories of products, and then adding code to the appropriate Web pages so that they can make recommendations regarding the related products.

Both the Category and Product objects in Commerce Server 2000 have RelatedCategories and RelatedProducts properties that can be used to retrieve the relevant information for inclusion on the corresponding product pages of a retail Web site.

In Commerce Server 2002, the related category and product functionality can also be accessed using .NET managed code using either the Commerce Server Base Class Libraries (BCL) or the Commerce Server Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA). In the BCL, the Category and Product classes can be used to retrieve information about related categories and products, respectively, and are accessed using the namespace Microsoft.CommerceServer.Runtime.Catalogs. In the PIA, the Category and Product classes are straightforward wrappers of the classic COM Category and Product objects, and are accessed using the namespace Microsoft.CommerceServer.Interop.Catalog.

Object Support for Advertising and Promotions

Commerce Server supports targeted advertising and promotions using the Content Selection Framework (CSF). For pages in a retail Web site, selecting content using the CSF consists of calling the GetContent method of the ContentSelector object, and passing a Dictionary object that specifies a variety of information about the content to be selected. To support the much more complicated process of configuring the various advertising and promotion campaigns using the modules of the Campaigns category in Commerce Server Business Desk, there are a wide variety of additional objects, including ContentList, ContentListFactory, ContentListSchema, ExpressionEval, ExpressionStore, ExprEvalContext, and ExprFltrQueryBldr.

In Commerce Server 2002, the advertising and promotions functionality can also be accessed using .NET managed code using either the Commerce Server Base Class Libraries (BCL) or the Commerce Server Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA). In the BCL, this functionality can be accessed using the namespace Microsoft.CommerceServer.Runtime.Targeting. In the PIA, the classes used for advertising and promotions are straightforward wrappers of the corresponding classic COM objects, and are accessed using the namespace Microsoft.CommerceServer.Interop.Targeting.

Object Support for Direct Mail

The main Commerce Server object used to support direct mail is the ListManager object, and is available in both the 2000 and 2002 versions of Commerce Server. In the 2002 version, it is available as a classic COM object, and as a wrapper class in the Primary Interop Assembly (PIA) using the namespace Microsoft.CommerceServer.Interop.Targeting. When programmatically constructing e-mail messages, the ProfileObject and ProfileService objects can be used to access addressing information as well as other information to personalize the message. The functionality provided by these profile objects is available using the COM objects, their PIA equivalents using the namespace Microsoft.CommerceServer.Interop.Profiles, or using their BCL equivalents using the namespace Microsoft.CommerceServer.Runtime.Profiles.

Object Support for Predictions

The PredictorClient object is used when accessing the Commerce Server prediction functionality in a retail Web site. Three additional objects, PredictorService, PredictorServiceAdmin, and PredModelBuilder are used by the user interfaces for managing the prediction functionality.

In Commerce Server 2002, the PredictorClient object is available in the Commerce Server Primary Interop Assembly (PIA) using the namespace Microsoft.CommerceServer.Interop.Targeting; the other three prediction objects are not available in the PIA and must be accessed using traditional COM programming. None of the prediction objects are available using the Commerce Server Base Class Libraries (BCL).

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