Activate widgets

1 min

Optimizely Product Recommendations defines two key concepts:

Tracking types – Visitor actions that can be tracked. See Track and recommendTrack and recommend.

Widgets – Display recommendations based on tracking-type calculations. See Product RecommendationsProduct Recommendations.

When an environment is set up, it has the following Commerce Connect-specific widgets. Widgets are configured for only a subset of the available tracking types — see TrackingTypes in the Commerce Connect APIs and libraries for the full list.

Default Commerce Connect widget configuration in the Recommendations portal, showing widgets configured for five tracking types

In a new environment, all widgets are inactive. Before you can track and receive recommendations, activate them with the WidgetService in EPiServer.Personalization.Commerce.

See SiteInitialization.cs in the Quicksilver sample site for a working example. The following snippet shows how to enumerate the widgets returned by WidgetService and activate each one:

var widgetService = context.Locate.Advanced.GetInstance<WidgetService>();
var response = widgetService.GetWidgets();

foreach (var widget in response.EpiPerPage.Pages.SelectMany(x => x.Widgets))
{
    widget.Active = true;
    widgetService.UpdateWidget(widget);
}