Loading the contacts/organizations, the right way

If you have been using Business Foundation, you most likely know about a limitation – you can only load the first 1000 objects using the GetXXX methods. For example, by using CustomerContext.Current.GetOrganizations(), you can load the first 1000 organizations. In theory, you can get more objects by changing the value of MaxObjectsList. However, changing that has consequences. Changing that will affect all types of objects, including contacts, organizations, and your custom objects. Also, loading too much in one go is almost never a good idea.

Is there a better way?

Yes, of course – which is why we have this blog post

There is a “hidden” method from base class of Business Foundation – BusinessManager that takes paging parameters

public static EntityObject[] List(string metaClassName, FilterElement[] filters, SortingElement[] sorting, int? start, int? count)

You will need to convert the results to the type you want. Note that all Business Foundation objects are inherited from EntityObject. So if you want to get the contacts by paging, it would look like this:

                var contacts = BusinessManager.List(ContactEntity.ClassName, new FilterElement[0], new SortingElement[] { new SortingElement(sortField, sortType) }, startIndex, recordsToRetrieve)
                .OfType<CustomerContact>();

Let’s go through the parameters one by one.

The first you need is the class name of your objects. For contacts, you can use ContactEntity.ClassName as shown above. For organizations, OrganizationEntity.ClassName
Next one is the filter. As you are trying to load all objects, you can just pass in an empty (but not null) instance – new FilterElement[0]
Third one is how you want to sort it. If you pass an empty array, it will be sort by default. If you want to sort by Name for example, set your sortField to Name and sortType to one of SortingElementType (Asc or Desc)
Forth and fifth ones are what we are looking for, they’re simply paging parameters – which position to start getting, and how many objects to get. Combine this with a simple while loop, you can get all of your Business Foundation objects.

And that’s about it, my friends.

What’s about caching?

Caching with list is always tricky – as you have to keep track of each item in the list to make sure you invalidate the list cache if one of the item is changed (updated/removed). For the purpose of just loading all contacts/organizations, it is probably better to just skip caching, for simplicity.

Get contact by email address

If you are using Episerver Commerce (or should I say, Optimizely B2C Commerce), you will, at some point, need to get the contact by an email address. That sounds like an easy enough task, until you realize that the class to manage customer contacts –CustomerContext has no such method. You will need to find another way, and this is one way you can do it

CustomerContact contact = customerContext.GetContacts().Where(m => m.Email == email)?.FirstOrDefault();

Of course this is not the optimal – avoid it if you can. First of all it loads a lot of contact just to find one. Also while it looks like you are getting all contacts (which is of course something to avoid), you are only get the first 1000 contacts by default, so the code above would return inaccurate result.

Is there a better way?

Yes of course.

Contact was built on “Business Foundation” – think of it as an ORM with extensions. Business Foundation allows great flexibility, with a few caveats. This is how you can find contact by email address:

            try
            {
                var filterEl = new FilterElement("Email", FilterElementType.Equal, email);
                return
                    BusinessManager.List(ContactEntity.ClassName, new[] { filterEl })
                        .OfType<CustomerContact>()
                        .FirstOrDefault();
            }
            catch (ObjectNotFoundException)
            {
                //Safe guard
                return null;
            }

BusinessManager does not have a Get method, so we are use List instead. Note that Email is supposed to be unique, so this should not have any down side with performance (see note below).

This is not limited to email, or to contact. You can find contacts by other properties, or get an Organization with same technique.

It is very important to note, however, this need a proper index on Contact tables, to make sure you are not killing your database.

Episerver Commerce CustomerContact Events

This post was inspired by this question: http://world.episerver.com/forum/developer-forum/Episerver-Commerce/Thread-Container/2016/9/commerce-manager-contacts-events/

and is an excerpt from my book: https://leanpub.com/proepiservercommerce

You might notice the lacking of events in some parts of the system. We have events for catalog system, for order system, for prices and inventories changes, but that’s not enough. You might want to have events – or at least – the ability to know when something happens. For example, when a customer contact is changed, or edited, or deleted, it would be very nice to do some extra actions.
Sending emails, updating external systems, etc.

Such events are not available out-of-box, so we have to implement our own. How? We don’t have ICustomerContactService (or something similiar) interface where we can write our implementation to replace the default service (and even if there is, it would be a big task to do so). So there’s no “ordinary”, framework-way to do that. However, CustomerContact is built on Business Foundation system, and BF, at its core, is all above extensible and pluggable. We don’t have ICustomerContactService interface, but we have IPlugin
who can do the same, and even more. As we learned in previous chapter, CustomerContact is just another EntityObject and all operations are still done via BusinessManager.Execute(Request) – even we have some nice wrapper methods to make working with it easier. And when Execute(Request) is called, it also runs all registered IPlugin modules.
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