Importing Product in Adobe CQ5

Question

I have a question on how we can import/synchronise products from our back-office to CQ5 front end.

The architecture to be is pretty simple - custom back-office managing all the products( basically it will be the source of truth). CQ5 driven web-site to show search results(driven by Adobe SearchAndPromote) and product details. Purchase transactions will be handled outside of CQ5.

I went through http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/ecommerce/eCommerce-framework.html and I think have some idea in which direction we should move, but I would like someone to confirm that my understanding is correct.

1) I need to create scheduled job running on Author node that would call back-office and import products as json feed. I use annotation based @Service(Runnable.class) - Is there a way to set it so it rund on Author node only?

2) Create custom service(called my service above) that will actually create all the nodes in crx. If I have desktop and mobile versions of the site do I need to create all those dones twice? Are there any tips on easier way to create those?

3) Let CQ5 replicate those products to publish nodes.

Is there a easier way? I mean if I was using more standard web-app I would have one controller to show product details, two templates(one for mobile, one for desktop) and a service that would call back-office and return details for requested product. But Sling world is very different, and I want to check if I understand it correctly.

Cheers.

Answer 1

Here are some answers:

1) Here is a good article about different configs for different runmodes: http://helpx.adobe.com/cq/kb/RunModeSetUp.html you can create configs for pub and auth runmodes with certain flag your code will look for which will tell whether to execute import or not.

2) It depends. CQ tends to have copies of content for mobile site so it may make sense to do copies of nodes for mobile site but only in case you those nodes are pages (cq:Page and cq:PageContent) you create based on imported data. Otherwise you just need to save imported data somewhere and obtain it at some moment (via JCR queries or methods like .getNode()). In this case of course it makes sense not to copy your data.

3) It depends here as well. I would consider following forces you may have: should imported data be editable? how frequent are updates? how massive are updates? how critical is consistency across pubs? In case updates are not massive, not frequent and consistency matters import to auth followed by replication can work. Also it may be the case if you need to be able to edit imported data. In case updates are massive and/or frequent and consistency across pubs do not matter much (you can afford that some people may see different results from different pubs during import) I'd suggest run import on all pubs at the same time since massive replication of imported data may affect regular page/images replications.

Thanks, Max.