About Content Selection Pipelines

Content Selection pipelines are used with the CacheManager object and the ContentSelector object to select content items or other custom content, including discounts.

The advertising and discount delivery engines in Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 are built using Content Selection pipelines. You can create your own pipelines to do different types of content selection.

Two distinct pipelines exist for each content selection application. The first pipeline is responsible for selecting content to be displayed, and is known as the Content Selection pipeline (CSP). It is based on the ContentSelection.pct pipeline-template file. The second pipeline is responsible for processing events related to the displayed content, and is known as the Event Processing pipeline (EPP). An example of such an event is a user clicking on an ad or an ad being selected for display on a page. The pipeline is based on the EventProcessing.pct pipeline-template file.

Note

• Although Content Selection pipelines are used to select discounts, the discounts are not applied in Content Selection pipelines. Discounts are applied to orders by the OrderDiscount pipeline component in an Order Processing pipeline.

The following table shows the CSP stages and the pipeline components provided for each of those stages, for each application.

CSP Stage	Advertising Application Pipeline Components	Discount Application Pipeline Components
Load Context	InitCSFPipeline LoadHistory	InitCSFPipeline LoadHistory
Filter	FilterContent	FilterContent
Initial Score	AdvertisingNeedOfDelivery	Not applicable
Score	HistoryPenalty EvalTargetGroups	ScoreDiscounts HistoryPenalty EvalTargetGroups
Select	SelectWinners	SelectWinners
Record	RecordHistory SaveHistory RecordEvent IISAppendToLog	RecordHistory SaveHistory RecordEvent IISAppendToLog
Format	FormatTemplate	FormatTemplate

The following table shows the EPP stages and the pipeline components provided for each of those stages, for each application.

EPP Stage	Advertising Application Pipeline Components	Discount Application Pipeline Components
Load Context	None	None
Record	RecordEvent IISAppendToLog	RecordEvent IISAppendToLog
Format	None	None

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