Positive Change Creations

Once a purchase order has been created, it is sometimes useful to change the values of that purchase order, values on the lineitems or the shipping address for each lineitem.
An example of this might be where the delivery address changes at the point of delivery after the customer has placed the order.

To change the values on an order, you must first get an OrderManagementContext object by either creating an OrderServiceAgent or an OrderSiteAgent.

OrderSiteAgent ordersAgent = new OrderSiteAgent("mySiteId");
OrderManagementContext oContext = OrderManagementContext.Create(ordersAgent);

Using the context it is possible to get a dataset which contains many tables of information relating to the order, the addresses and the lineitems.

You can change the values of the datarows to reflect your changes and then update Commerce Server using the PurchaseOrderManager.UpdatePurchaseOrder method.

This method accepts the dataset you have edited and an applicationId.

The applicationId is one of the values found in the transactionConfig.StatusManager database table. The default values are Site and LOB Adapter.

If the purchase order is a new order, you can use the value "Site" in yor method. If the order is not, then you need to check the status of the purchase order. This will be one of the values in the table transactionConfig.AllowedStatus table.
The ApplicationId you use in your method, must be one of the applicationId's in the StatusManager tables and that ApplicationId must has permission to update the status that the order form is currently in.

If you are having problems updateing the dataset, this is most likely the reason. Add permissions for you applicationId to modify the Purchase order for the state the orderform is currently in.

OrderServiceAgent agent = new OrderServiceAgent(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ShopOrdersWebServiceURL"]);

OrderManagementContext oContext = OrderManagementContext.Create(agent);

PurchaseOrderManager poManager = oContext.PurchaseOrderManager;

DataSet purchaseOrder = poManager.GetPurchaseOrderAsDataSet(new Guid(ViewState["orderid"].ToString()));

DataTable lineItems = purchaseOrder.Tables["LineItems"];

foreach (DataRow drLineItem in lineItems.Rows)
{

   if (ViewState["lineitemid"].ToString().ToLower() == drLineItem["LineItemId"].ToString().ToLower())
   {
      string shippingAddressId = drLineItem["ShippingAddressId"].ToString();
      DataTable addresses = purchaseOrder.Tables["Addresses"];
      foreach (DataRow drAddress in addresses.Rows)
      {
            if (drAddress["orderAddressId"].ToString() == shippingAddressId)
            {
               //update the dataset
               drAddress["firstname"] = "Hello";
               poManager.UpdatePurchaseOrder(purchaseOrder, "Site");
               break;
            }
      }
      break;
   }
}

I was quite suprised to find that CS2007 does not support uploading images for products through the business tools. This is a basic requirement for all E-Commerce sites to display images of the products they are selling. I have thought about some possible solutions to this common problem and have briefly outlined some of them here:

The solution seems to be to one of the following:

• Use a custom property on the product to specify the image path and then upload the image via FTP. You could then get the image path for the product when it is loaded, and use this path to diaplay the appropriate image.
  
  This has major drawbacks in terms of scalability because you have to know how many images for each product you will need and extending the number means adding more custom properties and coding on the website.
  
  It also has the drawback of allowing the client FTP access to the server and making them use a seperate FTP client to load their images.
  
  Another drawback of this approach is that if the client types in the filename wrong then the image will not be loaded.
  
  When a site contains many thousands of products, the directory structure will become extremely untidy and images are not automatically removed when the product is sold or deleted.
  
  Database structure is also not optimised at their will be a lot of redundancy with regards to space as some of the custom properties will remain empty as not every product will have the maximum number of allowed images.
  
  This solution might work for small sites with less then a 100 products and a client who does not mind using FTP.


• Create a bespoke web page upload using HTTP File Upload that adds a single path to an image folder for each product.
  
  This solution mitigates against the problem of clients typing in the wrong filename and also allows better management of file structure.
  
  It also allows a random filename to be applied to the image which helps with Spoofing attacks and helps complience with PCI guidelines.
  
  By storing one path to a specific folder into commerce server, it also stops redundency in the database and allows scalability to allow as many images as is needed. Each product can have its own set of images in its own folder which will help with directory management.
  
  Another benefit of using this approach is that you can automatically resize the images using a .NET Bitmap object so that all images are the same size and quality.
  
  To manage multimple images for a single product with different sizes and different descriptions and alt tags for each one, it is possible to implemented an XML file for each folder (which in turn means each product) and store this in the folder with the images or in a custom property in CS.
  In this way we can keep track of all the images for each product and what size should be displayed where, in a relatively space friendly way.
  
  The images would still need to be manually deleted though when a product is removed from Commerce Server. This would be easier though because each set of images is in its own folder which could have the ProductId as its name.


• The ultimate solution is to alter the business tools to allow image uploading and link in the products to the images so that when the product is removed, the image is also removed.
  This is by far the best solution for most projects, but does required quite an overhead in development time and means altering the underlying database structure of Commerce Server and the busienss tool UI.
  However, there is an excellent step by step approach given by Max in his blog here:
  http://blogs.msdn.com/maxakbar/archive/2006/09/20/764026.aspx of how to do this.
  
  I have not followed his article yet, but intend to just to see how its done! I'll post any comments to this soluton here and on his blog when I get round to implementing the solution.
  Please note, there are several parts to his step by step so make sure you follow them all.

Retrieving profiles from the database

We are creating a profile system whereby each UserObject profile belongs to an Organisation Profile object. I wanted to return all UserObjects for a specific OrganisationId but have found that you can only search profiles using the web services and not directly with the APIs.
This is because the search object ProfileManagementContext, which is used for searching, can only be created with a web service url or reference in its constructor.
Therefore I am having to use part API calls and part webservice calls to achieve my goal.

The only other way to search using the CS Library API is to use the CommerceContext.Current.ProfileSystem.CommerceOleDbProvider and access the Sql tables through this.
However, the provider does not allow 'and' or 'or' in the where clauses and does not allow joins. So returning UserObjects by GeneralInfo.UserId from the UserObject and GeneralInfo.Name from the Organisation object is not possible.

The only way to implement this functionality is to create a new Data Access Layer (DAL) to access the database directly, which is not recommended by Microsoft for obvious reasons.

See: http://blogs.msdn.com/maxakbar/archive/2006/11/03/free-commerce-server-2007-sql-2005-visual-studio-web-and-c-express.aspx
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At the time of writing there are not many message boards or blogs about Commerce Server 2007 and other than the official documentation help can be hard to find.

So we have created this blog which covers some of the problems I and other developers on our team have come across and how we overcame them.

The trial version of commerce server can be downloaded from Microsoft's Commerce Server website: http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/default.mspx

Please do not post any company specific information here as this blog is available as read only to the public