FAS 7.5 Upgrade Notes

Business Manager

FAS 7.5 includes changes to the Business Manager pages that configure Facets, Redirects, and Result Modifications. All those functionalities now use the trigger system, which has been used for the Campaigns (FAS 6.5) and Ranking (FAS 7.1) features.

Facets

FAS 7.5 contains a completely rewritten faceting engine. The new engine does support more options for controlling which and in which order options will be returned in the front-end. The new engine no longer supports the definition of "hierarchical" facets.

Existing facet configurations will be migrated to the new engine if possible, and the fredhopper.log file will contain information about the facet configurations that could not be migrated. These configurations will have to be reviewed and recreated using the new configuration options.

Prior to FAS 7.5, a set attribute type facet could be configured to 'show remaining values' after a user made a selection on the facet. In FAS 7.5, this display condition is expressed as a selection trigger. However, it is not compatible to both set this option to false, that is, to explicitly hide this facet after a selection has been made, and to set this facet to be lateral. As a result, when facets with such conflicting display conditions are loaded using FAS 7.5, they are migrated but disabled and assigned the label 'Cannot migrate: incompatible laterality constraint'. Users are encouraged to review their use of these facets, modify their trigger configuration if necessary, and re-enable them.

What has to be kept in mind when upgrading a live production environment is that the facets which get disabled disappear from the published live environment and, therefore, the front-end.

Result Modifications

FAS 7.5 allows result modification in both search and navigation queries.

Existing search result modification configurations will be migrated if possible, and the fredhopper.log file will contain information about the search result modification configurations that could not be migrated. These configurations will have to be reviewed and recreated using the new configuration options.

Redirects

FAS 7.5 uses the redirect functionality exclusively for 'external' redirects. Internal redirects to different catalog locations are now configured as a replacement of the request location on the new 'Result Modifications' page. See Result Modifications above.

External redirect locations will be encoded in application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME format. The existing configurations will be migrated automatically.

Changes to the query response

The XML <page> response to queries is mostly unchanged. Some notable changes include the following:

1. Some more info is logged in the <log-args> element.
2. The <process-time> value is now always rendered in US/UK notation (i.e., using a dot, not a comma).
3. Internal redirects are now modelled as result modifications that replace the query location. Therefore, some parts of the response now refer to the original query location. Previously all URLs would refer to the target location. More precisely:
   1. The <info> and <breadcrumbs> sections now refer to the original location.
   2. The <facetmap> and <items-section> sections refer to the target location (as before), except the 'more' and the 'less' <link> elements of the <filter> sections, which refer to the original location.
   3. The parameters fh_disable_redirect and fh_refsearch are no longer appended to URLs.
4. Responses no longer contain the breadcrumb with the type 'view'.
5. The fh_eds query parameter is no longer supported: all responses are encoded in UTF-8.

Indexing and replication

FAS 7.5 includes more validation of the input data as well as additional checks before replicating and loading an index.

Deployment

FAS 7.5 requires Oracle Java 7 update 5 or later (see Install Java for more information).

FAS 7.5 requires the Fredhopper Deployment Agent version 1.1-beta-6 or later.

The query syntax and the query response format are unchanged in FAS 7.5 compared to FAS 7.2.