SAP CX LIVE Sessions You Shouldn't Miss in 2018
We’re several weeks away from the SAP CX LIVE, the main SAP Customer Experience event. It’s time to plan your agenda. There are about 350 sessions in two days and all had merit. In this article, I highlighted some of the sessions I’m most looking forward to. Read More »
"No customization" mantra doesn't work anymore
In many projects, I hear the same thing: minimize the number of customizations and stick to out-of-the-box. The rationale is clear: the more things you add or change, the more expensive and complex the further support is going to be. Systems are getting bigger, less transparent, comprehensive and changing the default behaviour creates unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects. The cost of errors is increasing too. However, there is a flip side to that, and that is the lack of flexibility and responsiveness. What is a greater evil? Read More »
Product Image Visual Search in SAP Commerce Cloud / Hybris Commerce
Visual search is one of the latest breakthroughs. It is truly making a mark, especially in the eCommerce arena. In 2017, Pinterest launched a visual discovery tool. Ebay launched image search capabilities for mobile devices. These systems use AI and machine learning, that makes this approach too complex for the simple task of grouping products by color. In this article, I explain the basic solution for the Visual Search, and the details on how to integrate it with SAP Commerce Cloud / SAP Hybris Commerce. You will see how image similarity can be used for product recommendations, such as “similar color products” and “similar shape products”, as well as displaying products whose images are similar to the uploaded one. Read More »
In this article, you will find a collection of the blogs related to hybris and e-commerce development.  They have been hand-picked by me personally during the last years. I use the list below as bookmarks for regular use: for me, it is more convenient than using the bookmark bar in the browser. If you see I missed something important, please let me know.   Read More »
SAP Commerce Cloud 1808 (Hybris Commerce 6.8) is released. What's new?
SAP introduced a new version of SAP Commerce Cloud (previously SAP Hybris Commerce). In this article, I explain the key changes, improvements and enhancements announced by SAP. The article is based on the official release notes and videos as well as a bit of experimenting with the new version. After examination of the materials, code changes and documentation updates, I have to say that this release is just a minor update. Among the enhancements, only a few deserve to be highlighted: Integration API and, at a stretch, SmartEdit Content Versioning. Let’s have a deeper look at the new features. Read More »
There is a new feature in hybris 6.6, Generic Audit. The new mechanism keeps track of modifications of attribute values of the auditable set of hybris objects. For this purpose, both the original value of the object and its new value are stored in the database for further inspection, if the needs arise. According to the documentation, you can turn on and off auditing for particular types. For frequently changed objects, there is a risk that the system may consume a lot of database space over time, and the database itself grows to a very large size over time. So if you keep auditing on, you should keep these things under control. Shortly after SAP hybris 6.6 is released I found that this mechanism doesn’t work well. Specifically, when all the audit.*.enabled=false settings are applied, there are still types that are being audited anyway. The examples are Employee, Customer and Product. Many people observed the same, and the issue was reported to SAP. The bug has already been fixed, and, as to my knowledge, SAP has released a patch. I haven’t received the patch yet. I decided to investigate the issue in detail. This article reveals the details of the problem. Read More »
Essential Hybris Services
The services listed below are intensively used in SAP hybris development. It is not a full list of hybris services, but these are used almost in every project. I built the rating of services used in hybris source code and used it as a starting point for this article. The quick reference below will help you with understanding the important concepts on how services work and where they are used. For all services, the corresponding beans have the same name (start with a lowercase as per beans naming convention) Read More »
Groovy Scripting in hybris allows you to access hybris server objects directly from your browser. In this post, I share a new set of scripts. Read More »
In hybris 6.6, almost all project-specific files are located in the special folder called “data folder”. The structure of this folder is not well documented. The folders and files have “random” names. Basically, it is not very important until you find that this folder is too big. Understanding of its structure and purpose of its components will help you to troubleshoot and optimize the system. The official hybris documentation explains some technical aspects, but pretty tenuous. In this article, I’m trying to look deeper. Read More »