Writing tests is an important part of our work as software developers. Currently, there is no guidance on how to write tests for Sitecore Commerce Engine plugins and there is no straightforward way to do this. ASP.net core makes it possible to write in-memory integration tests. In this post I will share how you can use this to test your own Sitecore Commerce Engine plugins.
In the past 6 parts of this JSS Commerce series Joost Meijles and me described our experiences developing a basic Sitecore Commerce website with JSS. Most of the articles describe how we implemented a certain feature and why we did it that way. Now that we finished the experiment, we can look back and evaluate using JSS for Sitecore Commerce in a more general way. We will do this by asking ourselves a couple of questions.
In this part I will describe how we implemented the catalog pages. In part 2 I talked about how we implemented navigation with JSS & commerce. However, this only described how we implemented url navigation, e.g. how a URL is mapped to a commerce catalog item. This time we will focus on implementing a category menu, the category page and the product page.
In part 1 I described how we chose to expose the Commerce Engine in our JSS commerce experiment. In this part I will talk about how we implemented catalog navigation.
This is the first article of a multi-part series in which my colleague Joost Meijles and I will share our experiences developing a Sitecore JSS site on top of Sitecore Commerce. In this part I will discuss the first challenge we faced: how to expose the Commerce Engine to JSS.
Authentication with SXC9 is available in the online documentation, but how does authorization work? And how can you add authorization to your own controller methods?
For one of our Sitecore Commerce customers it is really important that product updates are processed and reflected on their website as soon as possible. In order to help them we really needed to understand where the product data is cached and how this is invalidated. In this post I will share our findings, which apply to Sitecore Commerce 8.2 & 8.2.1.
The default Sitecore eXperience Commerce order flow is quite generic and although it is not documented, it is possible to modify it. In this post I will share how to add a custom order state.
Today I needed to sort sellable items based on the listprice, which required me to do a deep dive into the SXC9 price calculation. This turned out to be not that trivial, so here are my notes.
Look at the new Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 engine and you will find that the engine itself is just a shell: the core functionality is implemented as plugins. Extending the engine can be done by creating your own plugins.
When I was trying to get the Sitecore 9 xp0 topology working, I ran into an issue with the xConnect SQL shard deployment. I installed everything using the SIF scripts and it seemed to have installed fine, but I found connection errors in the xConnect logs.
Sitecore eXperience Commerce 9 is expected to be released in Q1 of 2018. This new version will contain no more COM+ components and is build on .NET core. This means that we should be able to run it on Docker! To get ready for that I wanted to see if I could get the Sitecore 9 xp0 topology running on Docker. Per Manniche Bering, who knows a lot more about Docker than I do, already has Sitecore 9 XM1 running on Docker in [this repository](https://github.com/pbering/sitecore-nine-docker). So I wanted to see if I could use his work and add the services needed for xp0. Currently, I got most of it running on docker and will share the repository shortly. For now, I wanted to share some lessons I learned during the process and hopefully safe people some time. As a disclaimer, I am by no means a Docker or infrastructure expert. Any feedback is more than welcome!
Last week, the Mercury team attended the Sitecore Symposium in Las Vegas. There were a lot of great announcements, not least that Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 is to be launched in Q1 of 2018. Although Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1. was a huge step forward, it is a hybrid between old and new versions, which brought its own complexity.
Last year we started the development of Mercury, which is a generic E-commerce solution based on Sitecore & Commerce server. Over the years we have gained a lot of experience building E-commerce solutions. One of the things we wanted to do better with Mercury was to improve the User Experience, by using more client-side technology and by optimizing our usage of the browsers. This led us to find a client-side technology that would best fit our requirements. These days the amount of JavaScript frameworks is overwhelming, but in the end we went for Facebook’s React. In this article you will learn why.
Sitecore (development) environments can be quite complex. Especially when you are using additional software like Sitecore Commerce Server or Coveo. Next to this certain dependencies can change, for example updating certain dependencies in this enviroment.
