The Predictor Resource in VS .NET

Creating European Article Number 13 in VS .NET The Predictor Resource

Commerce Server 2000 provides the ability to send content, such as advertisements and discount notifications, to specific users. To do this, Commerce Server 2000 uses the Microsoft Windows 2000 Predictor resource, which is installed optionally with Commerce Server 2000. The Predictor resource allows you to build complex analysis models that you can use to determine the type of content, advertisements, and additional products that might interest your users. After the Predictor builds the analysis model, you can add the Predictor Client Object to your ASP pages, which gives your site the ability to display recommended products and targeted content. The Predictor resource uses a great deal of memory when building the analysis models. You can prevent this from impacting your Web servers by building the analysis model once and then copying it to each of your Web servers. Each Web server can host multiple analysis models to enable different predictive capabilities. After you build an analysis model, you can view its components by using the Prediction Model Viewer in Commerce Server Manager and the Segment Viewer module in the Commerce Server Business Desk. For more detailed information about the Predictor and guidelines for its use, refer to the Commerce Server 2000 documentation.

Commerce Server 2000 solutions usually use pipelines for business processing. A pipeline consists of a sequence of COM components that operate on a business object, such as an OrderForm. The components in the pipeline, and the order in which they are called, is specified in a pipeline configuration file (*.pcf). You can think of a pipeline as being a kind of production line in which each component performs a specific task before passing the business object to the next component. ConsolidatedRetail.com uses seven pipelines: Advertising.pcf, Discounts.pcf, Final.pcf, Lists.pcf, Pagbasket.pcf, Recordevent.pcf, and Total.pcf. Six of these have references that are stored in the application level MSCSPipelines dictionary variable as Advertising, Discounts, PAGFinal, Lists, PAGBasket, and PAGTotal respectively. The remaining pipeline, Recordevent.pcf, is held as a Commerce.OrderPipeline object in Application( CampaignsCSFEventPipe).

The components in a pipeline are COM components that implement the IPipelineComponent interface. This interface provides an Execute method, to which a Dictionary object can be passed. A business process is implemented by passing a business object such as an OrderForm to the execute method of each component in the pipeline in turn. Commerce Server provides a number of pipeline components that can be used in e-commerce sites. These objects are used to apply discounts to an order, charge tax, arrange shipping, and so on. In addition, you can create your own custom pipeline components to perform specific tasks. The ConsolidatedRetail.com site includes the following two custom pipeline components: G PersistUtility This is a custom pipeline component that is used for copying non-persisted attributes of the OrderGroup object to persisted attributes. Typically, attributes from the OrderGroup object that begin with an underscore are temporary values and are destroyed at the end of pipeline processing. Because this application exports an order form outside of the Commerce Server realm, some OrderGroup values that are usually discarded need to be retained to provide context in external processing. PersistUtility copies a few underscored attributes to names without underscores, so the values persist after pipeline processing is complete. G QueueEMail Class This is a custom pipeline component that takes data from the order form, converts it to XML, and uses the QueuedEMailer.CMailer component (described in the section, Custom Business Components ) to send an e-mail message to the customer.

Additional custom functionality can be added to a solution by creating custom business components. The ConsolidatedRetail.com site includes one custom business component: QueuedEMailer.CMailer. QueuedEMailer.CMailer is a custom COM component used to send e-mail to a customer. This is used for order confirmations and forgotten passwords. The component is implemented as a COM+ queued component, allowing its methods to be called asynchronously through a message queue. This improves response time by allowing a user s session to proceed without having to wait until the email processing is complete.