what is commerce entity and multi channel foundation?-Collection of common programming errors

12 years ago
admin
3 minutes

  • msdn Hi can anyone explain me what is commerce entity and what is multi channel foundation? thanks in advance! Regards

    Sakthivel.S


  • msdn1 Commerce serer 2007 exposes different API for different purpose but the main disadvantage is that it doesn’t give flexibility to develop ecommerce applications for multiple devices (channels – mobiles, kiosk, etc). To overcome this problem Microsoft has wrapped a new API model (multi-channel foundation) on top on existing commerce server runtime API. It exposes a set of models, known as commerce entities (such as products and baskets – similar to .NET entities) to represent the conceptual view of e-commerce. To know more about this, you can refer to following urls.

    http://microsoftblog.co.in/commerceserver/how-i-learnt-commerce-server-foundation/

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd327929.aspx

    Hope this helps.Regards,

    -Ravi Kanth Koppala 


  • msdn2 Hi Sakthivel, Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation is the official name for the Commerce Server 2009/2009R2 API. Foundation is simply a terminology provided by Microsoft to all the latest .NET APIs (WCF/WF/WIF/etc.), and multi-channel represented a concept introduced in 2009 that you can have multiple instances of your e-Commerce application targeted at a different targer or “channel”, an example being you can have a web-channel, and a mobile channel. The base of this API has been devised around 2 prominent .NET 3.5 technologies: ADO.NET Entity Framework and Windows Communication Foundation. The reason WCF has been introduced into the mix, is because Commerce Server has always been targeted to SOA based audience and support for ASMX is slowly disappearing. WCF also supports multiple end points which sits better with Microsoft’s overall cloud strategy ( in R2 you will start to see more interaction with WCF, and its potential to be used in combination with the Azure service bus).  The entities framework has also been closely modeled to introduce an ORM concept – mapping underlying objects to strongly typed business objects, or entities. This allows for legacy API to still be used but now represented in the newer 2009 API, but also third party systems can be implemented and represented within the same framework – making the API now consistant across all areas of Commerce Server (instead of the disparate API’s that where formally present). Entities have also been designed specifically to be maintain relationships, and have a state that can safely be transferred through the WCF services.  The process of the ORM also introduces layers of extra validation (Called sequence components) which can also provide extra business logic and integration capabilities. Overall the explanation of the whole API will take about 2 days – and is the main focus of the developer course run by Cactus Commerce, but please feel free to ask questions as I am sure you have any. Many thanks,

    Lewis