Main entities and their relationships

Following are the main entities to get the basic e-commerce store up and running and their relationships

• Website -> Store -> Catalog -> Categories
• Store -> Payment, Email, Facilities
• Categories -> Product

You will find most of the convenience methods to extract information out for these entities (for e-commerce) are in *Worker files. e.g. CategoryWorker has all category convenience methods, CatalogWorker for catalog and so on.

Not so obvious about Ofbiz Categories and Catalog

Assumption:You should already be familiar with Ofbiz Category/Catalog data model. If you are not, please refer to the database tables and understand the relationship before proceeding further.

PRODUCT_CATEGORY should contain all the categories that you ever need.
PROD_CATALOG_CATEGORY contains a subset of the categories from the above table. Why the subset you ask? ... because PROD_CATALOG_CATEGORY table contains categories which are directly linked to a given catalog. Under normal circumstances, you would need a handful of categories (which are of type identified by the type in PROD_CATALOG_CATEGORY_TYPE). e.g. Browse Root, Quick Add, Search and Promotions and may be Whats new and Most popular. Most categories in the PRODUCT_CATEGORY table should be direct or indirect child of Browse Root category and should be of type CATALOG_CATEGORY. Only a handful of other categories (e.g. Quick Add, Search, Promotions and any other custom ones that you define) are standalone categories.

• Quick Add category is used to group all the products which can be added together in one shot
• All child (immediate or otherwise) categories of Browse Root categories are used for Navigation on ecommerce site (e.g. left nav on the Ofbiz ecommerce demo).
• Promotion category is used to show promotional products
• Search categories are used for product searches.

Refer to Ofbiz ecommerce demo and demo data under ecommerce data/demo*.xml that you installed to see the relationship and how its used/displayed

How to Hot Deploy your application in Ofbiz

Ofbiz uses embedded tomcat container as a web/application server. Ofbiz comes with hot-deploy directory exactly for that purpose - to be able to hot-deploy your application. This comes in handy especially during development, since Ofbiz startup takes a while, restarting several times during the development can be painful.

hot-deploy in Ofbiz doesnt work out of the box, there are a couple of minor config changes that you need to do before you can use it.

1. Copy you Ofbiz application (web application) under hot-deploy directory. Make sure all the directory structure of your ofbiz application is correct.
2. Create (or copy from other ofbiz applications) component-load.xml file and add your applications load-component element tag
3. In your ofbiz_home/framework/base/config/ofbiz-containers.xml file change the property setting app-contact-reloadable to true e.g. <property name="apps-context-reloadable" value="false"/>
4. Restart ofbiz for this change to take effect.
5. To test if its working, modify one of the java files of your application and recompile it. You will see messages on your console and/or log file indicating the web app context being reloaded.
   Important: I use build.xml in my application to copy my application jar file under my applications ofbiz_home/hot-deploy/myapp/webapp/myapp/WEB-INF/lib directory. I have not tried choosing a different deploy location so not sure if it will work.
   

Setting up product database and seed data for Ofbiz

This post follows the main document on Ofbiz docs site and contains information that are not included in that document or information that is "in between lines".
Ofbiz Setup Guide

1. Make sure the default delegator in framework/entity/config/entityengine.xml is pointing to the correct database
2. For production db setup from the ofbiz home run ant run-install-seed , this will install only the seed data which is the bare minimum data required for Ofbiz to come up in the most basic meaningful way and then you can enter your custom data
3. Create your business specific data by looking at Demo*.xml files in ecommerce, accounting and other applications that comes with Ofbiz. In order to run and customize e-commerce store, you will need at least Accounting/data/DemoOrgnization e-commerce/data/DemoProduct.xml.
4. Pay close attention to the "id" fields in the data file, these are the primary keys for your data. In order to avoid conflicts with existing data choose alpha numeric keys which begin with a string which identifies your company or business.
5. Once these data files are created, they can be imported through the WebTools/Import functionality. If the files are successfully imported, you will see message towards teh bottom indicating how many entities were successfully imported. Note: import process is atomic and is part of 1 transaction - so if you have lot of data and if for any reason import fails, none of the data from that import will be saved. So you can import the data in its entirity.
   

Using ZK with Ofbiz/Opentaps

1. Download ZK from zkoss.org, unzip and copy the lib directory and its subdirectories anywhere inside your Ofbiz component. e.g. you could put it under OFBIZ_HOME/applications/yourapp/webapp/yourapp/WEB-INF/lib. ZK directories for 3.0.2 are lib, lib/ext.
2. Add classpath entries for these libraries in ofbiz-component.xml
3. Add appropriate entries for ZK in web.xml of your component. See (http://www.zkoss.org/doc/quickstart/ch07.html) for details
4. Create Hello World zul/zhtml page and put it in your webapp directory
5. Change web.xml for your component, if it has ContextFilter entry, add /zkau to the allowed path variable otherwise both javascript and css wont be loaded when you view the page

Key things to note:

Disclaimer: All the statements here are to the best of my knowledge, there may be other bigger and better ways to do things so do your own readings and research.

• How to add custom stylesheets to zk pages?There are 3 ways to add stylesheets

1. If you writing your own tags in the zhtml or zul page, put tag with reference to the stylesheet
2. In ZUL pages only, you can add PI
3. If you want to add site wide stylesheet (theme), you can add it in APPROOT/WEB-INF/zk.xml file containing the following tags
<zk>
<desktop-configgt;
<theme-urigt;/static/css/style.csslt;/theme-urigt;
</desktop-configgt;
</zk>

• How to add meta tags to zk pages

Meta tags are important from SEO and other perspective. Meta tags can be added using the PI in ZUL pages

• Included zhml pages at runtime complain about undefined standard entities like nbsp, copyright etc.

To fix this, add to each of the included pages.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">