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Publications

A publication is a snapshot of a segment's settings.

When a search is performed, the currently published settings for the segment will be used, rather than the settings in the admin interface, which are still unpublished.

Working with publications, rather than settings that activate as they are changed, makes it possible to test the effect of the settings before they are applied and will affect the end users.

Publications also make it possible to revert to old settings if the new settings cause unexpected problems.

An initial publication will be created and published each time a new segment id is created.

Publication contents

A publication contains the following settings:

The publication changes page and Compare list a change for each search phrase whose decision, readings or removed and kept products changed. A change shows the decision before and after, the chosen readings, and each product by name and product ID. Decisions that semantic search makes automatically take effect at once and are never listed as changes.

Working with publications

Validation

Before a publication can be published it needs to be validated. This will be done automatically.

A valid publication must satisfy the following conditions:

  1. The analysis index must be up to date. This happens automatically.
  2. There cannot be any errors in the analysis index.
  3. There cannot be synonyms, stemming overrides, hypernyms/hyponyms, misspellings, or irregular words that exist as ignored words or a misspellings.
  4. There cannot be any circular conflicts for hypernyms, irregular words, or synonyms. E.g. dog having cat as a hyponym, and cat having dog as a hyponym. Duplicate entries across multiple dictionaries can cause circular conflicts.
  5. There cannot be any experience condition conflicts, i.e. a experience condition cannot have a deleted scope id.
  6. There cannot be missing a fallback experience.
  7. There cannot be multiple fallback experiences.
  8. The publication validation results must be up to date.

The current validation status, and which changes the publication contains, can be seen through the UI and the admin host API. See the full API reference here.

Publication management

The following operations for publications are available:

  • History returns the publications related to the segment.
  • Publish creates a new publication of the current settings related to the segment. It does however require it has been validated first. Note that the segments state must be ready before a publication can be published.
  • Reactivate version reactivates an older publication with the specified version number and segment. A new publication is created as a copy of the old one. The unpublished settings are not changed. For example, a search phrase accepted after the reactivated version is shown as Pending publication again.
  • Compare compares two publications within a segment and returns the differences.
  • Get number of changes in publication returns the number of unpublished changes, including the changed search phrase decisions.
  • Reset all changes sets the unpublished settings back to the published ones. This includes the search phrase decisions on the semantic search page. A single search phrase cannot be reset on its own.

Publications can both be managed through the UI and the admin host API.

Recovery mode

In the event of unforeseen issues, Ecommerce Search can be put into Recovery Mode. When Recovery mode is active, certain options are disabled to aid in restoring a non-functional system to a working state.

To exit Recovery Mode, a new publication must be published. Note that new publications must be made for all segments.

The following features will be disabled for searches while in Recovery Mode: