Commerce Server Blog

What are commerce server pipelines? What are their advantages? Do we really require using them? Can I develop applications without using them? These are some of the questions we have while working with commerce server pipelines.

Pipeline framework defines links one or more stages of a business process, running them in sequence to complete a specific task. Some people may think that pipeline is just a .NET component which performs some tasks and they feel without pipelines help they can implement the same business logic in the application code. I agree with them. If possible, you can also use your approach by directly updating the values without using pipelines, but you should think of few other problems with this approach. By doing this, you are making application not to extend or scale further.

Today we are living in an environment where business is changing every hour. If we separate the frequent changing processing into pipeline components then our application can be flexible to adopt new changes (no need to touch code). For example, today we are calculating tax with some calculations; tomorrow government has imposed another tax (say e-tax – additional tax on the Internet purchases). As a developer, you have to create a pipeline to calculate additional cost and add the component to pipeline. Here e-commerce application doesn’t know how the processing will happen and what are the components involved in it.

Consider scalability, as you know pipeline components supports transactions. For example, you would like to have your own transaction logic implemented (as you are not using pipelines). Your application code can handle x number of transactions per hour. What if business got increased (during thanks giving or Christmas time)? Can your transaction block can handle x+x+x+x transactions? Through pipelines, it’s possible. You can scale the application by scaling it up or out.

For all people who hate/don’t want to use pipelines – my suggestion is to use pipelines and remove unnecessary stages.

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