Commerce V7 - Where do flow and feature configurations live? - websphere-commerce

Question

I am in the process of customizing a checkout page - the shipping / billing / payment page in WebSphere commerce Aurora Store - V7 - and there are configuration checks throughout the page. Such as:
<flow:ifEnabled feature="ShippingInstructions">
...
</flow:ifEnabled>
I have found that these settings are configured in Management Center under the checkout tab, however there is one feature called "SharedShippingBillingPage" that I cannot find anywhere in configuration, Management Center, documentation, or Google. Where is this configured and how can I turn it on or off?

Answer 1

The flow and feature configurations are modeled as e-spots in version 7. The USAGETYPE column for these EMSPOT rows will be STOREFEATURE for features and STOREFILEREF for store file references (like CSS etc). The NAME of the EMSPOT represents the feature or file name.
Each feature EMSPOT row is associated with default content in DMEMSPOTDEF table to indicate if the feature is enabled or not. The DMEMSPOTDEF entry's CONTENTTYPE column will have the value FeatureEnabled and CONTENT column will either be true or false to indicate if the feature is enabled or not. Not having an EMSPOT or DMEMSPOTDEF entry for a feature is considered to be disabled. Each file reference EMSPOT row is also similarly associated with DMEMSPOTDEF entry.
Esites: These e-spots support store relationships. A feature can be enabled/disabled or file reference can be changed in a specific e-site by introducing a DMEMSPOTDEF entry for the corresponding store.
Since feature enable checks involve database reads, it is cached using DistributedMapCaches.

Answer 2

Through submitting a support request with IBM, I was told that the SharedShippingBillingPage feature has been deprecated and is not supported. They said that this feature is set to default to true (enabled) though. Features like this are typically controlled in management center, so I started getting curious as to where this configuration is stored.
It turns out that this information is stored in the database tables related to eSpots. If you want to do a direct database query to find out if a particular feature is enabled it would look similar to this:
select ddef.storeent_id, e.name, e.description, ddef.content from dmemspotdef ddef left join emspot e on ddef.emspot_id = e.emspot_id where ddef.contenttype = 'FeatureEnabled' and e.name = 'SharedShippingBillingPage';
To narrow down more to your store add a storeent_id clause to it.
select e.name, e.description, ddef.content from dmemspotdef ddef left join emspot e on ddef.emspot_id = e.emspot_id where ddef.storeent_id = 10101 and ddef.contenttype = 'FeatureEnabled' and e.name = 'SharedShippingBillingPage';