Commerce Server Blog

Property is the basic capturing unit of a product/category behavior. We should create properties first and later assign them to the product/category definition. One thing many developers don’t know is that we can also create capturing units of a property, i.e., we can create a top level property behavior with the set of available properties and we can associate top level property to a product or category.

For example, I would like to associate a Boolean value which says whether the property can be exported to partners or not. The steps to follow are

1. Open Commerce Server Catalog & Inventory Schema manager.

2. Click on “Property Definition” under views.

3. Click on “Create New Property” under task.

4. Create a Boolean property named “IsExported” as shown below.

5. Now click on “Edit Property Metadata” under tasks. A new windows gets opened.

6. Click “Is Exported?” from available properties list and click add button. Now the property will move to Assigned properties list.

7. Now click Save & Close.

Now we have associating a new property to the property metadata. If you observe the database, a new Boolean filed is added to catalogAttributes table.

Displaying the column in “Catalog and inventory schema manager” is not possible as partner SDK supports extending Catalog Manager, Marketing Manager, and Customer and Orders Manager only.

Whenever the user search for a product, commerce server 2009 will not show any results if there are matches in database as shown below.

The following error is recorded in the event log.

The problem may occur because the search service may not be able to take requests from other application. The resolution is to restart, Office SharePoint Server Search and Windows SharePoint Services Search services. If still doesn’t working, just restart IIS to make it work.

On 16th January, Microsoft has released commerce server 2009 Release Candidate. CS 2009 RC delivers the ability to increase your business reach by making it possible to sell via multiple channels by using an out-of-the-box shopping site, SharePoint Commerce Services, and the Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation. So, what are you waiting for, download RC version from MS site and the link is.

https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b7eeda01-5cba-4945-a44e-a6f5e3eed0b0&displaylang=en

Keep visiting this site to know more about the new product.

In December CTP/commerce server 2009, there are many SharePoint out of box web parts provided. Each web part has it’s own significance. Check below web part list to know more about them.

I had a decimal property (“Weight”) created using commerce server catalog and inventory schema manager tool and I added this property as base property for all products. During catalog import, I am able to insert value with three or four precision into this field but when the business user  opens through catalog manager, the value is getting round off (only two precision showed). If mistakenly if he saves, wrong data is saved back to database.

For example, if the value in database is 4.2345, in catalog manager, it is showing as 4.23 as shown in the figure.

After analyzing the facts, what I found out is whenever a property of decimal is created from catalog manager, a new data column is created database products table of type float. Replacing float with Decimal (18,4), I am able to get back the entire value back in catalog manager, as shown in below.