promotion engine important questions

[RaufAliev]

Some questions about the promotion engine:

• Hybris doesn't allow checking the created promotion from the storefront unless I publish it. The workaround is a publishing it on the QA environment first. However, this doesn't help to avoid promotion configuration mistakes. Once I tested it on QA, I will need to do everything from scratch on the production. Correct?

• Workflow management is compatible with legacy cockpit framework only. For backoffice, particularly for the promotion, I need to create it from scratch. There is no workflow widget in backoffice. Correct?

• Potential promotion messages have actually a wrong name. There are messages that tell that the particular product is mentioned in the promotion conditions. There may be other conditions which are always false and this particular product will never have any discounts. However, the message will be displayed because it is mentioned in the conditions. Is it correct?

• Promotion groups and rule groups are not editable. Correct?

• rule groups are designed for stackable promotions. It means that promotions from different groups are not stackable. If so, what rule group will trigger first if the promotions from both groups are triggered?

• Is it possible to recalculate promotions against the order (not cart)? The facade has these methods, but it seems nothing uses them.

• promotion engine is memory consuming process because it is backed by drools. If I have 50 hybris servers in the cluster, my promotions will be calculated in every server of the set, and all 50 servers will eat memory for nothing. The more comprehensive my customization will be, the more memory ALL servers will consume. Is it a right way of the promotion engine design? Do you have any workaround for that? Something like that: https://hybrismart.com/2016/07/05/distributed-promotion-calculation-cluster-promo-as-a-service/

• There is no testing framework for promotions. How can I develop tests for the promotions to make sure that someone else hasn't broken the existing ones by adding their own?

• Promotion engine is catalog version unaware. Why?

• OCC doesn't have anything for the promotion engine and coupons. Why?

• How to use product variants attributes as conditions for base products?

http://hybrismart.com

[former_member357259 · Accepted solution]

Wow Rauf. So many in one go. I'll try my best 🙂

1. Yes, as of now you would have to test promotins on a 'QA environtment'. But we are planning to add the promotions staging feature in 6.4. It will allow you to preview promotions before they go live.

2. Yes, there is currently no workflow system in the backoffice. But again this is on the roadmap, part of the new PCM in backoffice. Then the workflow could be used for other items, like promotions.

3. Yes, promotions linked to a specific product do not evaluate other conditions whether they are true or not. They are aimed mainly at showing promotions that a product could be eligible for, e.g. on product details page. To get accurate results, you would have to evaluate all rules against the product.

4. No, rule groups and promotion groups can be edited like any other item type.

5. Yes, stackability works only within a rule group. But there is no priority for rule groups themselves. Priority value of rules determines the sequence of execution, irrespective of which rule group they belong to.

6. We are currently doing lot of improvements on rule deployment process and performance improvements. Watch out for more on the roadmap.

7. We internally use ATDD for regression testing of our OOTB promotion rules. We don't ship these tests but they are not so difficult to set up.

8. See Answer 1. This will take care of catalog awareness as well.

9. We have much bigger plans for OCC than just promotions. Watch out for the latest roadmap update to find out more.

10. You could create a custom condition to select base product and allow variant inclusion or not. There is a relation between base products and its variants and you could utilize that.

[RaufAliev · Accepted solution]

Thank you, Charles. Very useful.

[christoph_meyer · Accepted solution]

I would like to stress some points here, too.

• We need to be able to recalculate promotions on orders, not only on carts, which seems not possible at the moment.

• The promotion services contains code that is explicitly named as being non-threadsafe, plus a session based synchronization to fix that. This is totally broken, especially when using a stateless OCC application without persistent sessions.

What roadmap updates are you referring to? Is there a dependable list of features for the next release or is this a something we need/should contact hybris support about?

Cheers Christoph

[former_member357259 · Accepted solution]

Hi Christoph,

I'm referring to this roadmap - https://wiki.hybris.com/display/general/Roadmap

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Charles, could you please help me to understand when we are creating promotion rule there is flag called "stackable" flag in the promotion rule , if we set stackable flag as true what happens and if we set false what happens.

Many thanks

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

When stackable flag is TRUE then other promotions can also be applied along with the current promotion and if flag is FALSE no other promotions will be applied along with the current one.

[former_member624549 · Accepted solution]

very useful answer thank you. though some questions are not answered and a update 2019 would be interesting