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.

Continue reading “EntryContentBase, MetaObject, CatalogEntryDto, Entry: which should you use?” →