Zones

Within the Zones section, you can create re-usable items so that you don’t have to manage your zone contents at Rule level. For example, you can create a Top Banner zone that all the rules re-use - then, when you need to update it, it can be done from a central location.

Zone Attributes

Name

The name for the Zone. This will be visible within the dropdown for each rule. You can’t use spaces within this field.

Zone type

For each type of Zone that you can define within a Template, you can define content to be re-used via this section.

4 Kinds of Zones

There are 4 kinds of zones:

Each template can have a mix of these zones, and you can have many zones per template.

Content Zone

Content zones are created in Command Center as a “Content” and will return exactly the value that was entered within the rule. Content zones can hold HTML, comma separated values, or any other plain text.

Content Zones do not clean up the values after you enter it. This means they are usually used for:

• Storing plain text (like URLs)
• Storing complex HTML
• Entering flags (true/false)
• Adding instructions to the front end on how to render something (e.g., how wide to make a particular element)

Content Zone has a 200KB limit on content.

Rich Content Zone

Rich content zones give Merchandisers an HTML WYSIWYG editor, including a raw source code (HTML code) entry panel. While this zone doesn’t sanitize the input, it will try to ensure all the HTML tags are closed and possibly strip out illegal tags.

These tags, if left empty, will not be stripped out:

abbr
acronym
b
bdi
bdo
big
cite
code
del
dfn
em
font
i
ins
kbd
label
mark
meter
output
q
ruby
s
samp
small
span
strike
strong
sub
sup
time
tt
u
var

Because Rich Content zones let you edit HTML from within the Command Center, they are usually used to add simple HTML items that are nice to preview from within the rule. In particular these zones are used for:

• simple HTML structures that are nice to preview
• any time you expect to have complex link encoding (e.g. links with " or ’ marks within them)

Query Zone

This zone requires that you enter a search query such as a product mention, which will return the search results as part of the Template response. The idea is that you can bring in an additional set of results in addition to the main set of results - this way you can create other promoted material.

The Query zone takes in a search term - no other parameters can be passed.

The response will contain the search term you entered in the rule, and up to 10 results for this zone.

Expert Query Zone

This zone allows you to enter a raw JSON search request.

This means you can flexibly define a search, refinement, or a mix of both - effectively, any query that is supported by our engine can be used with this kind of zone.

You can use the reference application, to generate the correct JSON. The field, clientKey, will be automatically removed as it is not needed.

Please note, a maximum of 20 records will be returned with this zone.

OR-refinements within the Expert Query Zone

When the expert query contains OR refinements, the reference app will generate a query similar to the following:

{
  "collection": "example",
  "query": "search",
  "refinements": [
    {
      "type": "Value",
      "navigationName": "brand",
      "value": "Brand A"
    },
    {
      "type": "Value",
      "navigationName": "brand",
      "value": "Brand B"
    }
  ]
}

However, this will actually search for items that have both Brand A and Brand B instead of either Brand A or Brand B. To enforce the OR behavior, set the orFields parameter in the JSON as follows:

{
  "collection": "example",
  "query": "search",
  "orFields": [
    "brand"
  ],
  "refinements": [
    {
      "type": "Value",
      "navigationName": "brand",
      "value": "Brand A"
    },
    {
      "type": "Value",
      "navigationName": "brand",
      "value": "Brand B"
    }
  ]
}

Or Field

Specify which fields should be queried with ‘OR’ instead of the default ‘AND’. This behavior is typically defined in command center on a per navigation basis. However, you can set which fields should be treated as an OR field at the query level if desired. As with normal refinement selections, once you have refined, the list of refinements for that selected navigation will no longer be returned.

JSON Reference:

{ "orFields": [ "field1", "field2" ] }

Please note, each of the query zone types will count as a separate query.

Zone Value

The content/value that will be stored at Rule level. When you edit this later, this will be updated across all the rules that use this zone.

Example

For example, if you create a Rich Content Zone called Top_Banner, it will be visible within all templates that have a Rich Content Zone defined:

Creation of a new zone

How it Looks at Rule Level

Within my rule, you will first pick a template that has a Rich Content zone defined. My sample template has a Banners section.