Objects and Components of the Content Selection Framework

The objects and components of the Content Selection Framework (CSF) perform all the tasks associated with the scoring, filtering, and selection of targeted content.

CacheManager Object

ContentList and ContentListFactory Objects

ContentSelector Object

Pipelines and Pipeline Components

Expression Evaluator Component

User Object

Targeting Context Profile

Data Warehouse and Analysis Reports

CacheManager Object

The CacheManager object provides simple cache management services. It can periodically invoke Component Object Model (COM) components to fill a cache object, usually a Dictionary component, with information used in the content delivery process. It can also invoke components to write out information collected during the content delivery process, for example, counts of advertising events such as ad requests and ad clicks. For information about how to author these COM components, called Loader and Writer components, see Code to Implement Custom Cache Components.

ContentList and ContentListFactory Objects

The cache loader COM components invoked by the CacheManager object usually create a ContentListFactory object, which contains the entire content set that is available for selection. For each request for content coming in from the ContentSelector object, the ContentListFactory will create a new ContentList object to be used by that single request only. The ContentList object provides methods for scoring and filtering the content in the ContentListFactory object.

ContentSelector Object

The ContentSelector object is the unified interface for selecting all types of dynamic and targeted content displayed on the site. The ContentSelector object provides the means to pass extensible sets of global- and page-level properties to the Content Selection pipelines. It invokes the appropriate pipeline object and returns the resulting content as a SimpleList object of formatted content strings, usually HTML or XML.

Pipelines and Pipeline Components

The core work of content selection occurs in pipelines. Content Selection pipelines are separated into stages such as scoring, selecting, and formatting. You can write custom pipeline components that plug into these stages, either to replace the functionality of an existing Commerce Server 2000 CSF pipeline component or to augment the default behavior.

Scriptor components allow you to prototype a pipeline component in Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) or JScript. Pipelines are also used in the CSF for recording events related to content selection, such as ad requests and ad clicks. For information about the stages in a CSF pipeline and the CSF pipeline components provided with Commerce Server, see Content Selection Pipelines. For information about how to write pipeline components using the Commerce Server 2000 Software Development Kit (SDK), see Building Pipeline Components.

Expression Evaluator Component

The Expression Evaluator component provides flexibility for targeting content on your site. Expressions are constructed in Commerce Server Business Desk, grouped into target groups, and associated with content items available for selection on the site. At run time the EvalTargetGroups component evaluates the expressions in each target group and adjusts the scores of content items in the ContentList object. You can think of expressions as representing the goals for a content item, for example, if you want an ad to be shown to users whose favorite sport is football, but only to those users who are also over the age of 18.

User Object

To target users on your site, you will need to store information about those users and retrieve that information at run time. The Profiles resource and associated profile objects provide the means to do so. At design time you can manage and extend the properties available in the User object profile definition by using the Profile Designer module available in Business Desk and in the Profiles resource in Commerce Server Manager.

Targeting Context Profile

In addition to targeting users of your site, you may also want to target other information representing the context of a request for content. Examples of this are targeting content to users who are visiting your site from a particular domain, targeting content to specific pages or page groups on your site, and targeting content to pages where specific search keywords are provided.

The ContentSelector object serves the dual role of being the interface to CSF content selection, as well as being a property bag for setting context properties for targeting by expressions or filters. At design time you can manage and extend the properties available in the context profile using the Profile Designer module available in Business Desk and in Commerce Server Manager.

Data Warehouse and Analysis Reports

The Content Selection Framework enables you to log event data related to content selection into the IIS log files for your site. The log files can then be imported into the Data Warehouse for reporting. You use the Analysis modules in Business Desk to run reports on the user and site data stored in your Data Warehouse, and you use the results of those reports to perform business analytics on the performance of your Web site.


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