CoreMedia Digital Experience Platform 8 Developer Manual, Version 7.5.45-10
Chapter 5. IBM WebSphere Commerce Integration | 5.5. Link Building for Fragments

If you include CoreMedia fragments into WCS pages, these fragments might contain links to WCS pages; a link to an Augmented Category, for example. Depending on the scenario that you use, this link should led to a page rendered by the CAE (content-led scenario) or to a page rendered by the WCS (commerce-led scenario). The latter is named "deep link".

A use case for deep links might be the following: You have an existing commerce solution with carefully styled category and product pages. While you want to switch to CoreMedia DXP 8 in order to enhance your site with editorial content, there is no need to port the commerce pages to CoreMedia DXP 8. Instead, you want to reuse the existing pages (possibly enhanced with CoreMedia DXP 8 fragments).

Configuring deep links

CoreMedia DXP 8 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 IBM WCS. 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 5.6, “Enabling Preview of Commerce Category Pages in Studio” to learn how to enable the preview for WCS 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 IBM WCS, 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 CoreMedia Content Application Developer Manual for request handling and link building.

Format of Deep Links

Each lc:include requests an HTML fragment via HTTP from the CAE. Every link of a fragment that is requested by the WCS from the CAE is processed by LiveContextLinkTransformer classes. The transformer is only applied for fragment requests. Depending on the document type the link should be generated for, an absolute CAE URL is generated or a JSON string is returned. Each of these JSON objects contains at least the values of the constants LiveContextLinkResolver.OBJECTTYPE and LiveContextLinkResolver.RENDERTYPE and the ID of the content.

For example, the HTML fragment contains a link to a CMArticle document. Instead of rendering the regular link, for example

http://localhost/blueprint/servlet/page/perfectchef/magazine-spring/spring-salads-1888

the corresponding Link generated by the LiveContextLinkResolver would look like:

a href="<!--CM {
      "id":"cm-1696-1888",
      "renderType":"url",
      "externalSeoSegment":"spring-salads-1888",
      "objectType":"content"}
      CM-->" ...

The CoreMedia Fragment Connector will parse the JSON, identify the object type and rendering type and apply a template to render a commerce link that points to the parameterized Struts action CoreMediaContentURL. For the given example, the template Content.url.jsp will be used, applied by the pattern "<OBJECT_TYPE>.<RENDER_TYPE>.jsp". The JSP file will render a commerce URL afterwards:

http://localhost/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CoreMediaContentURL?
      storeId=10202&externalSeoSegment=spring-salads-1888&
      urlRequestType=Base&langId=-1&catalogId=10051

	Note
	The SEO feature has not been configured for this example, otherwise the externalSeoSegment value would be used to render a SEO friendly URL.

Other templates are located in the folder workspace\Stores\WebContent\Widgets-CoreMedia\com.coremedia.commerce.store.widgets.CoreMediaContentWidget\impl\templates by default. The path is configurable via property com.coremedia.widget.templates in coremedia-connector.properties. New templates can be added by extending the CMObjectLiveContextLinkResolver in the Blueprint workspace. Custom object types can be added, depending on the document type of the content or its property values. Also, additional rendering types can be defined for an object type. Using this templating mechanism, it is possible to support different layouts for content depending on its context.