Just Sitecore Things

In current days we are using e-commerce very often, even more then year before. What are our experiences with them? How many products they offer for us, how much properties those products have?

Usually that would be  clothes with some sizes, colors. But what if those products will be many and each will have more than 100 properties? How we should to build xCommerce architecture to deliver proper product and fulfill client expectations?

1. Context

Imagine that you have to deliver e-commerce solution based on xCommerce for client which:

• Has multi-site solution (32 sites)
  
• Has global market solution (32 markets)
  
• Has around 45 000 products per each market
• Each product has over 100 properties (parameters)
• Solution has 24 languages

How we should to bit this topic, what is crucial in xCommerce approaching here? 

Answer is catalogs and indexing part.

I will skip here topic Azure or Solr, we decided to use SOLR.

But in terms of catalog and indexing. We should to ask what is the the main risk here?

Answer is amount of the data that we can unexpected create (or let xCommerce to create) and later push SOLR to index it. Here fun fact - indexing then can take e.g. 40 days :]

2. Issue

Why?

Firstly what is the default xCommerce shop creation approach?

To create each site with own catalog. In this scenario let's calculate

Well let's calculate:

45 000 products * 32 markets (catalogs) * 23 languages = (*o*) this is the numcber of entries which we will have in xCommerce and later they will be indexed (or tried to index at least) by SOLR.

3. Solution

So what we should do ? Is there any way to mitigate this issue?

Yes, we have to decide to change the default approach and use only 1 shared catalog for each site. It's possible. To obtain the results you only have to remember to:

1. Assign catalog to main commerce catalogs node
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Do not assign any catalog to node under specific site catalog node
   
   
   
   
   
3. Link you Commerce catalog setting in each site Settings node to shared catalog in main commerce catalog node (point 1)
   
   
   
   
   
4. Change you custom queries to SOLR to check your sort of MarketId to filter proper products

Enjoy !

 

The default approach for Sitecore and xCommerce for indexing commerce items is to get items languages in as many version as you have defined in xCommerce. 

 

But not always this behavior is acceptable. In our scenario particular site languages versions were kept in Home item of every page. Basing on that, we are able to make it as a point of truth and during indexing match only proper languages versions to each site.

 

The result will be reduction of unnecessary entries in the index. What will have an influence on time and performance.

 

To achieve this we need to  implement new Crawler which will do new logic. It should inherit form default xCommerce crawler. Take a look below:

Afterwards we need to register this in the index configuration

Thank you :)

When we are using xCommerce we have products representation from xCommerce also on Sitecore side. You can see this products as an items with whole description as it usual has. There is also field describing template of an particular item. It should indicate to the product xCommerce template. 

In our scenario we had custom product templates because of our custom composers. Hence in Sitecore we see this custom templates as a definition of particular product (it consist custom product fields inside).

 

Issue

However, from time to time, randomly, this templates just... disappear. Since that moment Sitecore recognize this products as a default ones, described by default xCommerce product template.

That cause the issue with indexing, because custom fields weren't seen and indexed. What mean disaster for proper working application.

Walkaround

As a walkaround you can clear Commerce cache which push Sitecore to refresh xCommerce templates and get proper one. 

 

Unfortunately it doesn't mean it will work since that moment to infinity ;) It can broke one more time randomly.

So what we can do?

 

Solution

It's connected with CatalogRepository.CheckTemplatesMapping() method. When commerce items are loading this method is started.

 

After instance is restarted, when commerce items are loaded from Content Editor (when we navigate to catalog items in Content Editor) then Context.ContentDatabase is not null and there is possibility to load information about custom composer templates. 

 

But, if we open commerce items on Storefront after instance was restarted, before they are opened in Content Editor,  Context.ContentDatabase is null on Storefront. 
Hence, correct composer templates are not possible to load. 

 

Solution is to open CE and set up in path '/sitecore/content/<StorefrontTenant>/<Storefront>/Settings/Site Grouping/Storefront' new property "content" to 'Other properties' with "master" value. 

 

That will give us always filled database context.

Thanks !

 I was facing with situation when I had to attach our 9.0.3 xCommerce DBs to xCommerce 9.3 to check performance improvements connected with newer version of the tool. I started to do it and I found interesting steps.

So I've started to executing SQL upgrade scripts from WDP packages to upgrade xCommerce schema from 9.0.3 -> 9.1 -> 9.2 -> 9.3 to let me assign our DB to xCommerce 9.3.

From current version 9.0.3 to 9.1 I didn't have any issues. But during running last step from xCommerce upgrade guide 9.1 to 9.2 :

Run the SitecoreCommerce9.2.0_DataMigration_SharedEnvironments.sql script
against the Shared Environments database to migrate data from Sitecore XC 9.1.x to 9.2.0, I have an issue.

It looks like after upgrading schema, database contains tables only in new schema, so it can't achieve "dbo" instead of "sitecore_commerce_storage" what appeared after schema upgrade in previous steps. Hence procedure can't pass properly.

 

Workaround, here are possible options:

• backup Shared db with [dbo] schema (Shared db after upgrading to 9.1).
• Restore the backup on the machine where SqlPackage tool is installed. 
• Executing the ps1 script on this machine and move the Shared db with both schemas back to the initial machine.

Bests!

Indexing is wide and complex process.  Usually we get default solution to use default indexes, to save our time and effort. Probably in most common scenarios it is sufficient solution. But what when we have a lot of data and we would like to separate our data from default content data or we would like to separate invoking particular object indexing, scale this process etc.

 

 

The best option is to create our own custom index.

This approach is also doable to obtain in xCommerce. What we have to do is to write our own custom patches to switch indexing configuration to ours.

1. Custom Product Index declaration with commerce templates indexing

2. Product Index strategies and crawlers definition for xCommerce

 

3. We have to get rid of the products inside default master_index. It's done to don't keep duplicated data what also will have an influence on index rebuilding process. Especially in time consuming.

4. We have to indicate for xCommerce new index. To make it we need to prepare new Index Resolver with custom values.

Hello,

Last time I had a chance to check search engine in project with xCommerce. Its main responsibility is to collect products and it is based on SOLR services. During checking it, appeared the issue. When the SOLR engine started to indexing products which we had in DB it has eaten whole VM resources and after some time it just hang out. 

Now all of us can say - but why? 

Well it's really the best question we can ask (and the easier one), but unfortunately answer is not so easy to find. To find answer we can start with checking crawling process made by crawlers or strategies

Crawling you say? - Well, yes.

Details:

To be precise: we were working with Sitecore 9.0.2 + SXA 1.8 + xCommerce 9.0.3. We were using commerce API to add products from the external system and in general, it works fine. What we discovered is the difference in indexing implementation between Crawlers which are triggered manually and Strategies which work in the background. As a result, we see differences in SOLR results.

> Strategy that we use is: SellableItemsIntervalAsynchronousStrategy
> Crawler: AllCatalogItemsCrawler.

What is the gap? 

Well, when the strategy is fired up after the product import we see in SOLR many documents of the same product in the same language, like 30, 60 which has the same SitecoreId but different paths with "/[orphan]" as a root. We also figured out that Commerce keeps the same amount of entities in Mappings, where 30 entries have the same SitecoreId but different DeterministicID (also different to its SitecoreId).

We see that Strategy implementation is different than Crawler one and doesn't skip "orphan" items as crawler does. Hence after strategy activity, we see those 30docs in SOLR of 1 product, but after manual rebuilding the index which executes the crawler, we see only 1 (entry which doesn't have an orphan path, but correct one)

Solution:

The easiest solution is to implement skipping orphan entities in Strategies. To obtain that behavior we need to change base class for strategies: "CatalogSystemIntervalAsynchronousStrategyBase"

Thank you !

• server farm
• hosting environment profile

• manually change commerce engine policies and other settings after cloud deployment
• upgrade only xCommerce part to 9.0.3 version which already work perfect with this parameter as well. 

• internal hosting infrastructure or
• external providers

• DevOps maintanance
• Flexibility (issue)
• Complicated solution 

• Simpler maintanance
• Felxibility (pros)
• Easy to scale
• Fancy solution!

• Marketplace
• ARM templates

• Where we will host app
• How we gonna to deploy on it

• Azure Gateway

•  Logic Apps

• Hybrid Connection

• ASE (App Service Environment)

• 2 kinds of ERPs
• CRM
• Some Data Warehouse
• Product managemet system (PIM)

• Plugins
• Controllers and Commands
• Pipelines
• Blocks

• Independent features
• Only accepted way to extend Commerce Engine
• Don’t remove default ones just like that ;)

• Controllers works in the same way as usuall
• Commands are invoking inside the controllers
• Commands invokes Pipelines

• You can create your own pipelines and hook into pipelines defined in other plugin
• Similar to standard Sitecore pipeline mechanism
• In SXC9 they are in the code not XML
• Aggregate SXC Blocks
• Comparing to XML approach No „ShowConfig.ASPX” but JSON preview
• In Commerce, there is no config patching facilities. Instead we can create our custom plugin and can patch our Blocks through the code.
   

• Equivalent for Sitecore processors
• Chaining calls
• Remember about returning element

• Controller
• Command
• Pipeline
• Blocks

We also should remember about mentioned earlier registration piplines and blocks in the configuration classes. You will have it also below in the examples of code.

At this point we already have known general overview of ways which are possible to extend or customize xCommerce. We did extension of an entity via xCommerce composer tool. But we also have mentioned that there are ways to customize platform from code. We saw 2 main ways, by Policies and Composition, what means the best way - to create independent plugins.

Let's take a look on both of them.

At the beginning what you need is:

Sitecore Commerce Engine SDK, example:




1. Policies

By definition:

A named, versionable and variable set of data that can be used as facts within behaviors to influence behavioral outcomes. source

Policies is the simplest I think approach, but we should avoid using it. Why? Because it has an influence on internal xCommerce code, which can be changed e.g during upgrade. To have less stress and work we shouldn't touch internal xCommerce thing but extend it via composition approach.

Policies you can find in this place inside the SDK solution



Let's assume that we would like to extend our Customer entity. What we should to do is to find this entity in policies and add your custom field.


Yes, we did it! we have added a new property! Is it enough?
- Well, not exactly. We still need create a way to make it visibile outside.

But how to do that?

You still (like in a composition) create you feature project (plugin) and define there a few elements of your change. But...it's still less work than in composition. Usually, needed for you would be , command and controller. In policies like in composition approach your are adding new properties of entity as a new components. Difference is that, when you are changing policy this components are higher in hierarchy of childviews of your entity and you don't have to do much, to later gets them in Sitecore.
By composition approach those components will be buried much more lower to get it.

Now we understand that we have to think about chain of commands and controllers which uses it in xCommerce and extend those places with our custom property. Hence you have to think where you should to go to. To make it very useful is DotPeek, where you can find whole process flow.

Some custom command to make possible to get it like:



And a controller:


So we can say that xComerce part is done. Now we have to go to Sitecore side and try to receive new parameters.

Sitecore side:

Depend what your are doing, in our case it's customer so let's check registration controller which we use and would like to extend with custom fields. In our scenario is our custom controller written with some changes, which gets custom properties pushed by xCommerce in Customer component.









That's it. It's much more faster way to achieve customization of xCommerce entity - but remember that you are changing internal commerce files ! :)

Cheers!

1. Code approaches

• Composition
• Entities can be extended by adding components to the Components property on the entity.
• Components are just classes that are injected into the entity by a plugins with pipeline and blocks
• It's a independent way to add something more, without relation to other plugin or other elements.
• Policies
• In simple understanding we can treat Policy like a config or setting file in some way. You can for instance add a new field for the customer entity etc.

• DateTime
• Decimal
• Integer
• Boolean

• Manage Tags
• Link to entity
• Associate Items definitions