Commerce Server Blog

Commerce server Message manager provides us to manage localized message handling. We have to follow series of steps to covert the messages to satellite assemblies. So, here are the steps we should follow.

1. Create and modify RC.XML and include your localized text and languages (you can find in %Commerce_Server_Root%\Sdk\Samples\MessageManager folder).

2. Use RCxml2Resx.exe tool to covert RC.XML file into resx file. ( You can find it %Commerce_Server_Root%\Tools folder.) The input for this tool is rc.xml file.

3. Create resources file using Resource File Generator (ResGen.exe).

4. Generate satellite assemblies by using Assembly Linker (Al.exe) command-line tools.

After adding few languages (actually I added 32 languages to the xml file), when I run RCXmlResx.exe file, you can encounter problem and tools exits with an exception (as shown below) and nothing is written in the event log.

I checked many places but the solution is not found. After troubleshooting further, I found this error is due to following mistakes.

1. I used wrong locale code . Instead of “<Language Name="en-ZA" Locale="7177" />”, I kept “<Language Name="en-ZA" Locale="71777" />”.
2. I have added wrong language locale code (in my instance, I have added “<Language Name="en-AE" Locale="1033" />”).
3. If the language value doesn’t exists but a value (message) exists in <Entry> tags.

Note: The messages language value under <Entry> tags need not be in a sequence.

Two years back, I have blogged catalog importer, which will help us to import catalog data into commerce server. I have used this tool in many projects and business users like this tool as it uses excel as input parameter. Recently I see in communities asking for user profile import. User profile has some sensitive information (like password, secret question and answer, etc) and we can’t directly insert these data into database as these data should be encrypted using few algorithms (SHA1, SHA256, MD5, etc) before saving into database.

If your requirement is to import all existing user profiles then the good option is to insert data using commerce server API. I created a tool (simple and robust) which will help you to insert user profile (can extend to save address and other profiles) information in commerce server. The tool is very flexible and extensible without touching the code. Input to this tool is the excel file (sample file in data folder) and couple of constraints with this template are.

• The work sheet name should be “UserData”.
• Currently only 5 columns are there but you can extend the list – the column name should be same as commerce server column name. For example, if you want to import telephone number then the column name should be “GeneralInfo.tel_number”.

The code is pretty simple and self explanatory. When you run the tool, you will be prompted for excel file location. After providing the information, the tool loads data into data table and starts inserted data one by one into commerce server. The output of the tool looks like this (I have imported the sample data in the sample template file). Any wrong information in excel will lead to exception.

On successful import, if you query “UserObject” table (or other profile tables), you can find imported data.

Click here to download the tool.

Last week, I faced typical issue when we are trying to approve marketing campaign item from Marketing manager. Our data center is in Europe and business team is sitting in USA. They started complaining that they can’t approve the marketing items from their box and in the server we found following exception in event log.

Seems to be strange but we found out that this exception is coming only when the business time is less than Europe time. After changing the business user timing from EST to Europe, the business tool started working fine. Root cause is yet to identify but in this post, I would like to convey the remedy to everyone.

By default, when you install commerce server 2009, a help document (CHM) is created in your local machine. This document has lot of useful information on CS2009/CS2007. One of the disadvantage of this is that you can’t move this document to another machine. Finbar Ryan (MS CS support team) has created a CHM file using PackageThis tool. I thought of sharing the same to the commerce community so that people can start learning commerce server without installing the software. Thanks Finbar for sharing this document to the community. Click below icon to download the file.

At last, my waiting has come to an end when Microsoft has released commerce server 2009 template pack for SharePoint 2010 this week end (17th June 2010). With new CTP R2 and with manual deployment of R2, we can able to make the application work on SPS2010 with no errors.

What this template pack, we get following things

• Default OOB site with new look and feel (green, grey, etc ).
• Site can work on desktop browsers or mobile browsers (windows mobile, Iphone).
• Working code on SharePoint 2010 and support deployment in SPS2010 or SharePoint foundation 2010 environment.
• Supports only in windows 2008 or windows 2008 R2 operating systems.
• Partners SDK – can extend code to create new websites.

After installing the application, here is how it looks.

You can download this template pack from Microsoft site and the url is http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cfd0c459-5a11-4de6-9085-52d59e8d38e6

If this product got released four months before then I would have got a chance to work sps2010 but doesn’t matter, hope I get another opportunity soon to work on SPS2010. In next few weeks, I will start exploring the software and post my observations in this blog. So, stay tuned.