A use case for deep links might be the following: You have an existing eCommerce solution with carefully styled category and product pages. While you want to switch to Content Cloud in order to enhance your site with editorial content, there is no need to port the commerce pages to Content Cloud. Instead, you want to reuse the existing pages (possibly enhanced with Content Cloud fragments).

Content Cloud supports two settings to switch to deep links for categories and products:

The settings are at the root channel of each site. The default setting is true, which means that the CAE creates deep links to the product or category pages of the HCL Commerce. However, for links to other content types, such as HTML, CSS or JavaScript, links to the CAE will be generated. Also, URLs to dynamic resources (UriConstants.Prefixes.PREFIX_DYNAMIC) won't be converted to JSON. See Section 9.3, “Enabling Preview in Shop Context” to learn how to enable the preview for HCL Commerce pages in Studio.

The settings are evaluated by the LiveContextPageHandlerBase and its subclasses.

If a setting is true, the corresponding @Link method creates links to HCL Commerce, so there is no need for a matching @RequestMapping method. If it is false, the @Link method creates CAE links. So you must keep the according @RequestMapping method in sync with changes to the URL pattern and provide (or customize) the ProductPageHandler or ExternalNavigationHandler classes. See also the Section 4.3, “The CAE Web Application” in Content Application Developer Manual for request handling and link building.