FAS 7.2 Upgrade Notes

Images with multiple links

A new frontend response element is introduced for campaigns that show images with multiple links.

<static-content type="image-map">
  <content name="imageMap_1" type="image-map">
    <content-value>http://demo.fredhopper.com/images/standarddemo/banner-images/New-arrivals-home.png</content-value>
    <content-area-link type="catalog" x1="27" y1="230" x2="169" y2="255">
      fh_location=%2f%2fcatalog01%2fen_GB%2fcategories%3c%7bcatalog01_18661%7d&fh_reftheme=e46a5271-0e0c-4f92-95a5-72033e8997dd&fh_refview=lister
    </content-area-link>
    <content-area-link type="catalog" x1="176" y1="230" x2="318" y2="256">
      fh_location=%2f%2fcatalog01%2fen_GB%2fcategories%3c%7bcatalog01_18664%7d&fh_reftheme=e46a5271-0e0c-4f92-95a5-72033e8997dd&fh_refview=lister
    </content-area-link>
  </content>
</static-content>

Each of the content-area-link elements describes one configured link area. These links are returned in the order they are defined in the Business Manager.

Attribute-types and display-fields elements

The attribute-types and display-fields child elements of the universe element appear on all pages regardless of the selected page template.

Starting with FAS 7.2.1.5, attribute types may declare the base type as 'unknown' if no value has ever been loaded for the attribute type. A display field is declared for this type, and 'Show attributes and assets without values' is enabled in the 'Presentation' settings.

Additional information in breadcrumbs elements

FAS 7.2.1 provides additional information in crumb elements for facet selections:

• Type of selection (lower bound, upper bound).
• Each value and its localisation separately'.
• Link information for removing single values or the whole crumb.

The following example shows a selection on 'colour contains either green or pink':

<crumb>
  <url-params>fh_eds=%c3%9f&fh_location=%2f%2fcatalog01%2fen_GB%2fcolour%3e%7bgreen%3bpink%7d</url-params>
  <name value="{green;pink}" type="facet" attribute-type="colour">green; pink</name>
  <range invert="false">
    <value-set aggregation="or" constraint="low">
      <entry>
        <value non-ml="green">green</value>
        <link type="remove">
          <name/>
          <url-params>fh_eds=%c3%9f&fh_location=%2f%2fcatalog01%2fen_GB%2fcolour%3e%7bpink%7d</url-params>
        </link>
      </entry>
      <entry>
        <value non-ml="pink">pink</value>
        <link type="remove">
          <name/>
          <url-params>fh_eds=%c3%9f&fh_location=%2f%2fcatalog01%2fen_GB%2fcolour%3e%7bgreen%7d</url-params>
        </link>
      </entry>
    </value-set>
  </range>
  <link type="remove">
    <name/>
    <url-params>fh_eds=%c3%9f&fh_location=%2f%2fcatalog01%2fen_GB</url-params>
  </link>
</crumb>

Display-hint shows information on how to render a facet

FAS 7.2.1 adds a new display-hint attribute on the filter element to indicate how to render the facet to a frontend. The attribute is optional and can contain one or more hints, separated by spaces.

The following example shows how the display-hint attribute appears on a facet on the 'colour' set attribute type, which is configured in the Business Manager to allow 'or' selection:

<filter on="colour" facetid="facet_10" basetype="set" show_number_values="4" selected="true" display-hint="multiselect-or">
  <title>Colour</title>
  ...

Decoupled variant selection and sorting

FAS 7.2.1 has decoupled the sorting of lister pages on secondary attributes from selecting variants for display. As part of this improvement, the selection criterium has been unified between the different page templates. See Variant Selection for further details.

Display of all variant attribute values

FAS 7.2.1 adds support for showing the values for a particular attribute for all selected secondary items. This can be enabled in the Business Manager using the 'all-variant' fields:

The frontend renders the values and adds an attribute selected to indicate this behaviour: if selected is 'true', the attribute element represents the attribute value of the currently selected secondary item. If the selected attribute is 'false', then the attribute element represents the values of all secondary items associated with the primary item.

In the following example, the first attribute element shows the colour of the selected item (blue), while the second attribute element shows that there are also red and green variants available:

<attribute isnull="false" name="colour" basetype="set">
  <value non-ml="blue">Blue</value>
</attribute>
<attribute isnull="false" name="colour" basetype="set" selected="false">
  <value non-ml="blue">Blue</value>
  <value non-ml="red">Red</value>
  <value non-ml="green">Green</value>
</attribute>

The all-variant display option requires indexing the attribute in the navigation index (see Business Manager > System > Navigation).

The all-variant and selected-variant display options can only be used in campaign display fields starting from FAS 7.2.1.5.

SOAP Address

FAS 7.2 does not handle SOAP requests sent to http://host:port/fredhopper-ws/services/FASWebService?wsdl. All SOAP requests must be sent to http://host:port/fredhopper-ws/services/FASWebService.

URL Encoding

Starting with FAS 7.2.1.5 requires the query URLs for REST requests and the parameters in SOAP requests to be UTF-8 encoded.

Indexing

FAS 7.2 added a new warning when a category identifier contains the underscore character ('_'). The underscore character is used internally to create the full category identifiers, and using an underscore as part of the single identifiers can lead to ambiguous queries.
For example, consider the following category tree:

catalog01
 |
 +-- mens_shoes  [1]
 |
 +-- womens_shoes
 |
 .-- mens
        |
        +---- shoes [2]

The internal id used for categories 1 and 2 will both be 'catalog01_mens_shoes', and a location such as //catalog01/en_US/categories>{catalog01_mens_shoes} will produce undefined results.

FAS 7.2 fixed an issue that incremental updates to attributes of type 'float' or 'int' of an item with invalid values would delete that attribute from the item. FAS 7.2 will instead reject the invalid value and apply no changes to the item's attribute. The old behaviour can be restored by setting the /com/fredhopper/tools/XmlLoaderApp/@illegal-attribute-value-deletes-attribute-behavior system configuration setting to the value 'true'.

Triggering

FAS 7.2.1 fixes issues with matching locations on set and listing attributes to properly handle situations with more than one selected value. The behaviour of triggers created with previous versions will not change. Then the Business Manager will show an additional checkbox to indicate that the location matching happens using the previous algorithm ('exact' matching):

If the checkbox is unchecked and the change is saved, the Business Manager will not show the checkbox again when editing the trigger, but 'exact matching' can be manually enabled using the REST API.

Deployment

FAS 7.2 requires Oracle Java 7 update 4 or later (see Install Java for more information).

Extensions

FAS 7.2 supports search on indexed enumeration secondary attribute types natively. The configuration of the extension for the relational attribute search (relational-search-filter) will be migrated transparently, and the deployed extension will be ignored. The extension can be removed when upgrading to FAS 7.2.

FAS 7.2 is currently not compatible with the 'spread-ranking' or 'mark-function' extension.