Commerce Server Blog

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.
  
• 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).

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