Commerce Server Blog

Commerce server Order system auto generates tracking number. On application start event, it will continue to allocate a batch of tracking numbers from tracking table even if you don’t use them, so you’ll continue to see that counter jump up even if you’re not de-queuing any of those values when saving your order (this is by design). As per our application architecture or topology, we have three data centers having multiple front end servers and each datacenter will have a commerce server site with a database cluster and there is a transactional replication between these commerce server transaction databases.

There is big risk of order numbers getting duplicated during replication. Having unique prefix/suffix solution may not match to our requirements. I thought of setting up some sort of centralized Order Tracking service which all WFEs request tracking numbers from database (like one master database, a WCF service, SQL components). I also created SQL scripts which locks table and give unique number to each request – click here to download the code. Once we get order number, we assign the number to card and save it in commerce server. For this, you can refer to msdn link.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nihitk/archive/2006/06/21/cs2007-predefined-trackingnumber-for-order.aspx

I have seen this as big monster problem but, end up with a very small fix leveraging OOB features. Order system keep the track of order numbers in IdentityCounter table. The idea of setting aside 10 million sequence numbers for each of the 3 instances has a good fix as we don’t think we’ll run out of that many order numbers soon and thus may not have to worry about doing central master doling out order numbers or worrying about duplicating order numbers across sites.

Learning – don’t see every thing as big issue and try to accommodate the design with out of box features or with little acceptable customizations.

To open to customer and order manager tool, you should install SSL certificate on web server and SSL secure channel should be enable in profile and order virtual directories. You can use SelfSSL tool to create SSL certificate. SelfSSL.exe is part IIS 6.0 resource kit tools and you can download it from Microsoft site.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/993a8a36-5761-448f-889e-9ae58d072c09.mspx

If you don’t want to install SSL, then there is a trick to do that.

1. Open “CustomerAndOrdersManager.exe.config” file located in  “C:Program FilesMicrosoft Commerce Server 2007Business User Applications” folder.
2. Go to Configuration -> ApplicationSettlings -> Microsoft.CommerceServer.UI.CustomerAndOrdersManager.Properties.Settings -> AllowHTTP setting.
3. Change value from “False” to “True”.
4. Now your “Customer & Order manager” tool  will not ask for HTTPS to connect to profile and order subsystem.