C#, SQL, Episerver/Optimizely, performance, and beyond
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.
Continue reading “Pro Episerver Commerce is finally draft-complete”
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 🙂 ).
Continue reading “I was with the EMVPs, and that was a fantastic experience”
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.
Continue reading “Why (and when) should you contact Episerver developer support service.”
This post was inspired by this question:Â http://world.episerver.com/forum/developer-forum/Episerver-Commerce/Thread-Container/2016/9/commerce-manager-contacts-events/
and is an excerpt from my book:Â 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.
Continue reading “Episerver Commerce CustomerContact Events”
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.
Continue reading “The hidden danger of dot (Or why should your metafield not contain . in the name)”
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?
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).
Continue reading “How to check if a coupon was successfully applied”
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:
Continue reading “The beauty of new promotion system”
This is an excerpt from my book – Pro Episerver Commerce – which is now already 2/3 complete.
Previously we discussed on how properties work with catalog content. However – if you have dictionary types in your MetaClasses, they will work differently. In this section we will examine these special data types – this applies to Order system metaclasses as well.
As we all know – there are three types of dictionary in Episerver Commerce:
Single value dictionary type is supported in the strongly typed content types – you’ll need to define a property of type string, with backing type of typeof(PropertyDictionarySingle)
[BackingType(typeof(PropertyDictionarySingle))]
public virtual string Color { get; set; }
Continue reading “Episerver Commerce MetaDictionary internals”
From what I heard, developers seem to love both QuickSilver – as a template – and ServiceApi – as a REST server – very much. Despite of being relatively new on the field, they are being used quite frequently – QuickSilver is the preferred choice for MVC template while many sites are using ServiceApi to update the catalogs. What’s about the combination of these two? Would it be the best-of-bread for Episerver Commerce. I would say yes, but after you have fixed the issue.
The installation of ServiceApi.Commerce package to Quicksilver site should be easy and painless. Update the database and build the project, you should be expecting to have a working site.
Not quite. You should be seeing this error:
A route named 'MS_attributerouteWebApi' is already in the route collection. Route names must be unique. Parameter name: name
It’s because
MapHttpAttributeRoutes
is called twice (as it’s called in ServiceApi as well). So naturally, let’s try by commenting that line in SiteInitalization.cs, and build it again.
This can also be solved by adding this into appSettings:
"episerver:serviceapi:maphttpattributeroutes"
Which will signal ServiceAPI to skip calling
MapHttpAttributeRoutes
A new error would show up:
I’m not a security expert myself, not even close, but for more than once, I’ve been greatly concerned about the risks for having accounts in several websites. I wonder myself why did the developers there go with the decisions that bad.
It’s already bad enough to use HTTP on your register/login page . It’s even worse when you send me my password in plain text. Either the one I chose or the one you randomly generated for me.
And this has happened more than once. Each time, it raises my eyebrows higher and higher. I don’t want to rant here – but it takes great deal of ignorance or laziness, or both, do do such as bad practice about securities.
Continue reading “Never send me my password”