For a good long amount of time, workflows have been an essential part of Episerver Commerce (and even before that, Mediachase eCF). Once you get into order system, you just can’t escape workflows – because you need them. They handle many – if not all things, from validating items, checking inventories (to make sure that you are not selling something out-of-stock, or just discontinued (think of Galaxy Note 7, poor little shiny phone)), applying promotions, calculating taxes, process payments, and finally adjust inventories (yay, a customer places an order, let’s ship to him as soon as possible, firstly allocate the goods for him). And workflows are even required by later processing – when you complete the shipments (another happy customer!), or when you issue a return or an exchange (well, let’s keep the customer still happy).
Category: Episerver
EntryContentBase, MetaObject, CatalogEntryDto, Entry: which should you use?
It can be pretty confusing for new Commerce developers to understand how to work effectively with entries in Commerce. There are many things which represent the same concepts, however they are different and their APIs are not compatible. So which is which and what should you use?
Which is which
- CatalogEntryDto is the DataSet to represent one or more entries (CatalogEntryDto can of course be empty). Beside the basic information like Name, Code, or MetaClassId, depends on how did you load it, a CatalogEntryDto can contain information about the assets, the associations or the variations (you can specify what to load by using CatalogEntryResponseGroup parameter. CatalogEntryDto, however, does not contain information of the metadata system of an entry – for example, if you add a metafield named “Description” to your entry metaclass – that is not available in a CatalogEntryDto.
CatalogEntryDto can be loaded or saved by ICatalogSystem methods.
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Catalog Search APIs are for editing only!
If you are using Catalog Search APIs for any customer-facing features, you are doing it wrong!
I have seen this problem a couple of times – the search feature on the site is “dead” – it is very slow, and the log file is usually filled with dead lock or timeout error. As it turns out, the search feature was implemented by Catalog Search APIs, which is a big no-no.
To be clear, there are two builtin APIs related to searching in Episerver Commerce: the “fast” one, which can be done via SearchManager, ISearchCriteria and ISearchResults, is the SearchProvider APIs. It’s the indexed search (strictly speaking, you can make it not “indexed”, but that’s beside the point), and the actual search functions will be provided by providers, like LuceneSearchProvider, Solr35SearchProvider, or FindSearchProvider.
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Pro Episerver Commerce is finally draft-complete
Yes you read it right. The book is now draft complete!
9 months ago I announced that I’m writing a (first ever) Episerver Commerce book.
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I was with the EMVPs, and that was a fantastic experience
If there is anything I regret being an Episerver employee, is that I can’t be an EMVP – the gang of awesome Episerver developers which their contributions are widely recognized by the community (I don’t consider myself to be “awesome”, but I try (to be)). The EMVPs can be seen as the evangelists of Episerver frameworks and technologies, they spread their wisdom, experience and best practices to help developers build better solutions, and they give valuable feedback to us to build better frameworks.
EMVP Summit is one of special treat Episerver gives to EMVPs, as a recognition for their contributions, and also a chance – directly than ever – for Episerver to listen to the feedback from their distinguish developers. As a software engineer in Commerce development team, I was sent to team up, to talk, to discuss and to socialize with the EMVP (after winning a small competition with my two teammates, and getting a grant from my wife 🙂 ).
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Why (and when) should you contact Episerver developer support service.
Today I filed a bug, which I should have filed almost one year ago. I saw it several times, I even had solution for it, but I didn’t think/know it was a bug. It was reported here: http://world.episerver.com/forum/developer-forum/Problems-and-bugs/Thread-Container/2016/9/commerce-catalog-randomly-goes-empty-until-website-restart/ and here http://world.episerver.com/forum/developer-forum/Episerver-Commerce/Thread-Container/2016/6/addstaticattributepropertyvalues-object-reference-exception/
I’ve always wanted to say Episerver products are perfect frameworks and have no bugs at all. But that’s not true. Despite of having very talented developers and dedicated QAs, and a very high requirement for quality (“Quality is non-negotiable”), we still miss to catch some (very few) bugs.
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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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The hidden danger of dot (Or why should your metafield not contain . in the name)
A dot (.) – it is harmless. What harm can it do, it looks pretty innocent.
And yet it can break your Catalog UI.
Catalog UI relies on the Shell UI from CMS to render properties and such. Shell UI, in its hands, needs to know about the metadata of the properties. When you have dot in the metafield names, the MetaDataPropertyMapper will create an Property with that name on site start up. And then when you open All properties mode, Shell UI will request your content type models, and CMS Core will happily return those properties.
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How to check if a coupon was successfully applied
When a customer add a coupon to his/her cart, it’s nice and best practice to show to him/her if the coupon has been applied successfully, or if it was an invalid/not applicable code.
How can you do that?
In old promotion system
When old promotion system run, each successfully applied promotion will be presented by an instance of Discount, which has a property named DiscountCode – this is the coupon used for the promotion (it can of course be null if the promotion requires no coupon).
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The beauty of new promotion system
This is going to be a relatively short post. If you are using Episerver Commerce 9, you probably know that we are working on a new promotion system. It’s still BETA, but some of our customers already use it, and from what I heard they are really happy with it.
One of the reasons we create a new promotion system is the old one is not developer-friendly. Have you ever tried to create a promotion in old system, by code?
This is an “simple” example of how to create a new campaign and a couple of promotions:
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