Commerce Server Blog

When configuring SharePoint commerce services, we may get some warning like – "Check for SharePoint Infrastructure Update: failed". The error may be due to not installing all mandatory infrastructure updates.

Check if the following software are installed are properly

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Or MOSS
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 Or MOSS SP1
• Infrastructure Update
• Infrastructure update x64 Or Infrastructure update x32 ( WSS )
• Infrastructure update x64 / Infrastructure update x32 ( MOSS 2007)
• Cumulative update package (Would Require Registration and a download/password link would be emailed)
• February cumulative update package (WSS)
•  February cumulative update package ( MOSS 2007)

Verify SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard does not throw any error. If any of the above are not installed then

1. Download & Install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Or MOSS. Run SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard
2. Download & Install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 Or MOSS SP1. Run SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard.
3. Download & Install Infrastructure update x64 / Infrastructure update x32. Run SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard.
4. Download & Install February cumulative update package.Run SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard
5. Run SharePoint Commerce Services Configuration Wizard. If you encounter a failure in “SharePoint Admin Service”
6. Change following registry settings
   Add: DWORD ServicesPipeTimeout @ HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control & assign 60000
   Modify: WaitToKillServiceTimeout to 120000 @ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control string value
   Reboot the server

Sometimes, on system restart we may get wired error when we try to access commerce server default site about missing resource files. When you check “App_GlobalResources” folder under c:\inetpub\wwwroot\… directory, I found some of the resx files are missing/deleted.

We have couple of options available to fix this issue.

Option 1. If you have another environment, copy the missing resx files from that machine to your machine.

Option 2: Deactivate and activate commerce server features to fix this issue. Follow below steps explain how to deactivate/activate.

1. Open SharePoint Central Administration.
2. Click on Application Management tab.
3. Click on “Manage web application feature” link.
4. Activate missing Features as shown in the figure.

Note: If the above features are already activated then deactivate the listed feature and active them again.

Recently, I have seen a post in community on how to implement marketing discount based on quantity. The business requirement is to to set product price based on product quantity purchase.

Purchase Quantity                     Price
1 – 24                                        $20.00
25 – 49                                      $19.00
50 – 99                                      $18.00
100 and up                                $17.00

If customer buys 15 products, they have to pay $20 for each product.  If they buy 32, they have to pay $19 for each product and so on. It is pretty simple requirement and we can implement them using discounts priorities in commerce server.

For this, create a Base product with price as 20$. Now create three discounts of Minimum Purchase Discount type

1. Discount 1 : Buy minimal purchase of 100 products and get 15% discount (discount Priority 1)
2. Discount 2 : Buy minimal purchase of 50 products and get 10% discount (discount Priority 2)
3. Discount 3 : Buy minimal purchase of 25 products and get 5% discount (discount Priority 3)

User cases:

1. Customer purchased 24 products – none of the discount applies so he has to pay base price (20$ per product).
2. Customer purchased 26 products – Discount 1 and 2 are not applicable and only discount 3 applies (he get 5% discount).
3. Customer purchased 51 products – Discount 1 is not applicable and discount 2 & 3 are applicable. Discount 2 will be applied on the basket as it has more priority over discount 3 (he get 10% discount)
4. Customer purchased 101 products – All Discounts are applicable. Discount 1 will be applied on the basket as it has more priority over discount 2 & 3 (he get 10% discount).

The solution works fine if we have to apply for 1 product. If we want to apply for more than one product then the problem starts. If the user takes 20 items of product A and 20 items of product B and if we created these discounts at category or all products level then the customer will get 10$ discount but our requirement says, the user is not eligible for any discount as he purchased less quantity (less than 25).

While creating “Minimum purchase discount type”, when the user selects for product, currently the business tool asks the user to select the product, instead if the user leave the text box blank then it should create this discount at product level.

Business users uses Marketing manager to perform CRUD operations. The operations can be on advertisements or discounts. When you perform any create operation, the newly added item will not be used unless the business user approves it (we have to refresh cache  too). When the user deletes any item, by default the item is moved to deleted items and if required the user can restore that item.

What if we need to delete all items from recycle bin? We don’t have option to delete items from recycle bin and I feel intentionally Microsoft didn’t give this feature to the business users.

So, the option is to run command line utility to delete these items (more work to application support engineer). The utility name is “PurgeCommerceData” and by default this executable is located at “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Commerce Server 2007\Tools”.

PurgeCommerceData takes three parameters.

• First parameter is the site name.
• Second Parameter is commerce stream. Use –b for basket purge, –p for purchase order purge, –c for categories, products and inventory SKUs purge and –m for marketing data purge.
• third parameter is optional and it takes following options
• -d <days>: This option can be used to purge data that have been unchanged in the last specified number of days. It works with basket, purchaser order or marketing data purge and
• -n <name>: This option can be used to purge baskets with a specific name and it works with –b flag only.
• -o : This option can be used to purge promotion codes for old discounts and works with –m flag only.
• -s <status> : this option can be used to purge purchase order with specified status and works with –p flag only.

The below command can be used to purge all marketing data that was unchanged for past 14 days.

PurgeCommerceData StarterSite -m -d 14

If the operation is success then output will be “Success” else “Failure”.