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Alert in Tools Framework

Tools Framework uses its own JavaScript function to display an alert message instead of JavaScript alert function. The normal JavaScript alert function does not use UTF-8 encoding to display any message. So double byte character messages will not be displayed correctly. So to address this issue, Tools Framework uses its own JavaScript functions for displaying any messages to the client.

The Tools Framework JavaScript function for displaying an alert is

alertDialog("Alert Message");

Commerce Accelerator Customization

I was customizing WebSphere Commerce Accelerator for that last couple of weeks. We are adding a new feature for configuring a product dynamically. WCS does not provide any product configurator OTB and hence no screen was available in Commerce Accelerator to manage the Product Configuration. Our business wants to manage the Product Configuration from commerce accelerator. So the only option available to us was to customize Commerce Accelerator. Customizing WebSphere Commerce Accelerator is a very difficult task. Commerce Accelerator uses a framework called Tools Framework which manages all the state using JavaScript. If someone wants to learn Object oriented JavaScript the best thing to do is to customize some of the Tools Framework components. The biggest issue with Commerce Accelerator customization is JavaScript debugging. CA works only in IE and there are no good debuggers available for JavaScript debugging in IE.

Every time I customize Tools Framework I will think to document how to do this customization. However unfortunately it never happens. So next time when I started customization I need to do the same research again and again. So this time I kept some notes on how to create Wizard, Notebook, Dialog, Tree etc.

I am thinking of some posts that contain these notes on customizing and debugging of commerce accelerator whenever I get some time.