Purchasing capability from the generated HTML page is automatically handled via an EZLink inserted in each page during generation.
Page generation is available standard on Silver, Gold & Platinum (B2B) versions. Please contact your Service Provider to enable this mechanism if you are running a different version. All systems are initially configured with page generation OFF so as not to interfere with site installation and product definition. Once your data is installed, you can enable the page generation module from the Admin Setup Wizard (System->Admin Setup Wizard).
You normally don't have to run the page generation utility since the product page creates, updates and deletes product details pages in the background every time you edit product information. However, if you load product information from another database (such as initial load or direct update), the file generation mechanism will by-passed and page will be out of sync with the database. This utility addresses the latter situation.
The utility starts running when you click the 'Generate Pages' link. A pop-up message will be displayed when the task is complete. Page generation is generally very fast, in the order of 150-200 pages per second. The page generation process will first delete all previously generated product pages to make sure that no obsolete information is kept by the system.
The pages are generated in the folder specified when setting up the store. You should make sure that this folder is accessible by internet users (both robots and users).
Since each page must have a unique name, the system creates it using the prefix EZS followed by the product unique ID then the first 30 characters of the product description, stripped of all punctuation and formatting characters. This makes the page name both unique and readable by humans.
Example: EZS-1001-MyGreatProduct.html
Note that if you change the name of the product, the system will delete any previous instances of EZS-1001- pages, then generate the new page, so no obsolete data will exists in the auto-generation folder. Pages are not generated for expired products. However, if you expire a product with an expiration date set in the future, the system will not be able to disable that page in real-time. This is why we recommend running the global 'Generate Pages' function from time to time to insure accurate synchronization.
The entire process is self-managed and requires no attention once set-up.
Integration Notes:
A special folder on the web site is required to store the generated pages. Although there is no obligation to do so, we recommend the folder to be named 'autogen' for consistency across implementation. Your Service Provider normally installs and configure this feature.
IMPORTANT: The 'autogen' folder should not contain any other files since the system may, from time to time, delete and re-generate all information contained therein.
Web and physical paths for the 'autogen' folder are defined using the the Admin Setup Wizard.
In addition to the individual product pages, the system also generates a indexed catalog containing links to all product pages. The catalog is created in the web root folder and is named EZSCatalog.html. A link to this catalog can be provided from the index page of the web site for optimal navigation and indexing by spiders, bots, crawlers and other Internet critters.
Very Large Databases:
1. If the store contains a very large number of products (over 5,000), an error may be triggered by Windows 2000/XP Server as the amount of resources used exceeds the capacity of the Operating System to handle the process in one DTS transaction. This error does not affect the file generation itself but rather warns that the operation would not be rolled back in case of errors. This error can safely be ignored.
2. When saving a product record in a store containing a very large number of products, the update may take much longer than when the file generation is not enabled. This behavior is due to the fact that the file system must scan a very large number of files in the 'autogen' folder in order to retrieve and update the product detail page. If the performance degradation becomes a problem, we recommend the following method:
- Disable file generation for normal operation. This will greatly improve the performance when saving product records.
- Re-enable file generation and run the 'Generate Pages' on a weekly basis (or when a significant number of products have been added and/or modified), then disable file generation again to return the system to its nominal performance. With this method, all file generation occurs in batches and the file location overhead is not incurred every time a product record is accessed.
File generation can be enabled/disabled using the Admin Setup Wizard.