Merchant Access to Catalog Manager

ravikanth | January 11, 2010

Recently I came across a post in MSDN communities where the query request says ‘how I can give access to the Merchants so that they can add/browse his products using catalog manager”.

The requirement is genuine and we will get such requests from customer regularly. Some of the commerce server developers think that it is not possible as the user of a role (say catalog Administrator or Editor) can able to see all catalogs in a particular site. In few some cases developers has created a separate site for their tenant/merchant to achieve this functionality. In this blog, I am explaining a simple tip which will allow access to provide multiple tenants to their catalog only.

Simple tip: You can achieve this using Authorization manager setting (Azman) and there are no changes to commerce server configuration settings.

  • As you might of aware the Azman works with windows authentication. So, whenever you get a new tenant, you should create his user Id and password in Active Directory (AD).
  • As a administrator, create a catalog for the tenant. Now if you reload catalogAuthorizationStore.xml in Azman, you can able to see new scope for the catalog.
  • Now you expand the scope and assign proper privileges to tenant AD user id.
    clip_image002
  • Now if the tenant opens the catalog manager, he can able to see only his catalogs.

Note: All operations and tasks are copied from parent to scope level and I recommend to create proper roles and task at scope level too.

In this example, I have assigned my ID to catalog editor role in – Adventure works catalog but not in “Adventure 2 works” catalog. When I open the catalog manager, I can only see adventure works catalog but not the other one (as shown in the image below).

clip_image001

For more information on Azman, refer to msdn – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms914867(CS.70).aspx

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3 Responses to “Merchant Access to Catalog Manager”

  1. Rabinarayan Biswal says:
    January 15, 2010 at 4:49 am

    Hi Ravikant

    I read some of your posts and all are nice and informative .
    However, I am a newbie to commerce server development and aftre installing Commerce Server 2009, MS SQL 2005 and VS 2008
    in a Windows 2003 box really struggling hard to create my first application in asp.net .

    1. Could you please let me know what are the tools I need to use to build a simple catalog system.
    2. Is there any way to create and add new catalogs and products to the database .
    (I have downloaded commerce Server 2009 partner sdk, but when I open Catalog manager none of the menus are working .
    They are laa in disable state like File->New->catalog)
    3. What are the steps I need to follow to build a simple catalog system (to view catalogs and products)

    Any help is highly appriciated .

    Thanks
    Rabi

    Reply
  2. David Espino says:
    July 7, 2010 at 2:49 pm

    Hi

    My name is David. I read your CS blog and I think it’s awesome!!. I’m having an issue trying to connect CS2009 to an external datasource. I wiil be really thankful if you can help me a bit.

    I’m trying to use CS 2009 to conect the webparts (from CS itself and custom) to an AX catalog. I’ve written code to work with an example outside the Context of CS. The code is the following:
    public Microsoft.CommerceServer.Catalog.Product GetProduct()
    {

    CatalogSiteAgent ctlgAgent = new CatalogSiteAgent();
    ctlgAgent.SiteName = “MyDemoSite”;
    CatalogContext context = CatalogContext.Create(ctlgAgent);
    return context.GetProduct(“Adventure Works Catalog”, “AW149-15″);

    }
    This code works just fine, and the information is shown in a basic Web Page. However, I can’t find a way to implement the CatalogContext Methods to pull the information from another source instead CS 09 own cantalog. Should I use another Clases?
    Could you please help me with this issue?

    Thanks

    Regards David

    Reply
    • ravikanth says:
      July 7, 2010 at 7:36 pm

      Thanks David for visiting my blog. If you want to get non-commerce server catalog information then CS2009 API doesn’t support it. To gain profit on performance, I would recommend to write custom web services to fetch data from commerce server (Agent API, have few limitations) and this approach works like facede layer to fetch data from other sources. I have developed Silverlight application on top of CS with custom web serivces and demonstrated the same in Microsoft virtual tech days – you can find more details in my blog (refer it for more details).
      http://microsoftblog.co.in/commerceserver/microsoft-virtual-tech-days/

      Hope this helps.
      Ravi Kanth K

      [WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ’0 which is not a hashcash value.

      Reply

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