Personalized Find

Personalized Find is a personalization service that you can add to Episerver Find. This topic describes how to work with Personalized Find search attributes and values provided to the Episerver Find search client to boost search hits.

Note: At this time, Personalized Find only works with Episerver Commerce.

NuGet packages

To install Find Personalization, install these NuGet packages (in addition to Episerver.Find).

• EPiServer.Personalization.Commerce
• EPiServer.Find.Personalization

See Installing Episerver updates.

Configuration

To enable retrieval of search attributes, configure the Attribute API. The required attributes are episerver:personalization.Site and episerver:personalization.ClientToken. See Episerver Recommendations for information about configuring the Recommendations API.

Retrieving attributes

Before executing a personalized find query, the attributes must be fetched from the Recommendations API. This is not a quick process, so the attributes must be fetched and stored or cached for fast retrieval before the user needs them. In this way, latency is not adversely affected when a site visitor executes a query or filter.

There are two ways to retrieve attributes:

• Call the Refresh method on an instance of the EPiServer.Find.Personalization.IPersonalizationClient. To retrieve the active EPiServer.Find.Personalization.IPersonalizationClient instance, call the Personalization() extension on EPiServer.Find.Personalization.IClient.

  Sample code

  using EPiServer.Find.Personalization;
  
  namespace EpiserverSite.Controllers
  {
      public class MyController : PageController<MyPage>
      {
          private readonly IClient _client;
  
          public MyController(IClient client)
          {
              _client = client;
          }
  
          public ActionResult Index(MyPage currentPage)
          {
                  System.Threading.Tasks.Task.Factory.StartNew(currentContext =>
                  {
                      System.Web.HttpContext.Current = (HttpContext)currentContext;
                      _client.Personalization().Refresh();
                  }, HttpContext.Current.ApplicationInstance.Context);
  
              return View(currentPage);
          }
      }
  }

• Decorate a controller with an EPiServer.Find.Personalization.RefreshPreferences attribute. This gets attributes from the API when any action method on the controller is executed (Hint: To avoid unnecessary refreshing, check the IPreferenceRepository for attributes first, or use the controller to track if a refresh has already been done for the visitor).

namespace EpiserverSite2.Controllers
{
    [EPiServer.Find.Personalization.RefreshPreferences]
    public class MyController : PageController<MyPage>
    {

        public ActionResult Index(MyPage currentPage)
        {
            return View(currentPage);
        }
    }
}

The Recommendations API call is done asynchronously, so has little effect on the time to execute the controller.

var result = _client.Search<ProductContent>()
     .For("ferrari")
     .UsingPersonalization()
     .GetContentResult();

Last updated: May 23, 2018