FAS 7.1 Upgrade Notes

Frontend Changes

We're introducing a new frontend response element that represents the ranking applied on the page. This tag is only present in lister pages and located in /page/universes/universe[@type='selected']/items-section/results/ranking in the FAS response. It has the following structure:

<ranking>
  <id>1df78de963e803192c91203c4c49dcff9ae3caa</id>
  <sort-fields>
    <sort-field>
      <sort-direction>DESC</sort-direction>
      <sort-attribute>sort_field_1</sort-attribute>
    </sort-field>
    <sort-field>
      <sort-direction>DESC</sort-direction>
      <sort-attribute>sort_field_2</sort-attribute>
    </sort-field>
    <sort-field>
      <sort-direction>DESC</sort-direction>
      <sort-attribute>sort_field_3</sort-attribute>
    </sort-field>
  </sort-fields>
</ranking>

Business Manager

FAS 7.1 introduces a new system for configuring rankings based on the trigger system. A BMDB migration is required to make the configuration page appear in the Business Manager. Old configuration settings from System Manager > Presentation > Lister Page are migrated automatically when the qserver is started.

The new ranking system makes the existing custom component for localised rankings obsolete, and the configuration from this component needs to be manually translated.

Business User Management: When upgrading to FAS 7.1, only the 'admin' user will receive permissions to access the new Business Manager page. After the migration, you should review permissions for other Business Manager roles to ensure they can modify rankings if needed for their daily work.

FAS 7.1 also changes the way campaigns that show items based on an attribute of the currently viewed item are configured. The selector only shows attributes that are either:

1. used in existing campaigns in such a filter, or
2. configured in the System Manager > BM Defaults as 'behavioural attribute'.

Reporting

FAS 7.1 removed the support for displaying analysis output from Fredhopper Reporting.

Indexing

FAS 7.1 changed the xmlloader to process items from incoming XML files in fixed-size batches rather than based on the number of operations in the incoming XML files. The FAS 7.1 xmlloader was also improved to fail fast on errors and report them properly. FAS 7.1 will no longer retry loading partial XML files until they become complete.

The logging configuration in config/log4j-cmdline.xml of a previous FAS version will no longer work correctly with the new version.

Monitoring

Starting with FAS 7.1, a query server will only report what is available (via /status?fas or /fredhopper/up.txt) when all configured navigation and search indices are available. Previous versions reported availability as soon as navigation indices were loaded.