Activate widgets

Optimizely Product Recommendations defines two key concepts:

• Tracking types – Visitor actions that can be tracked. See Track and recommend.
• Widgets – Display recommendations based on tracking-type calculations. See Product 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.

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);
}