Details About Order SubSystem.

ORDER SUBSYSTEM

• Order Sub-system is a component of WCS that provides shopping carts, order capture, order fulfillment, inventory & payment function support.
• An order includes one or more products, billing & shipping addresses, payment details & the total cost including shipping charges & taxes.
• From a customer persective an order is a list of selected products.
• Each product in a list is called an order item.
• From a store perspective an order is a list of order items.
• Orders are associated with a single store.
• An order profile is a special type of order that can be associated with either a store or a store group.
• The order profile holds default information about a customer such as payment information, shipping address, shipping mode & billing address.

Ø There are 4 inventory systems, they are:

1. ATP inventory.

2. Non-ATP inventory.

3. No inventory.

4. External inventory.

ATP Inventory: The ATP inventory model enables you to allocate stock from existing inventory or backorder from expected inventory. You can also obtain an estimated availability time for each order item once it has been added into the shopping cart. The ATP also supports allocating stocks for future order processing.

Non-ATP Inventory: The non-ATP inventory model supports inventory operations that are only based on existing on-hand inventory.

No Inventory: The no inventory model assumes that all products have infinite quantities. When the products in a store are virtual products, digital downloadable products, or electronic assets, such as downloadable images or music.

External Inventory: External inventory is used for Websphere Commerce and some external inventory systems integration. For integration with other inventory systems, you might select ATP, non-ATP, or No-inventory inventory system based on the specific inventory system and integration scenario.

The shipping codes for an order sub-system are:

• A - Payment Authorization requires review.
• B - Backordered.
• C - Payment Authorization complete.
• D - Deposited.
• E - CSR Edit.
• F - Ready for remote fulfillment.
• G - Pending remote fulfillment.
• H - Error in remote fulfillment.
• I - Submitted.
• J - Trashcan.
• L - No inventory.
• M - Either a part or total amount is approved.
• N - Approval denied.
• P - Pending Order.
• Q - Quick order profile.
• R - Released.
• S - Shipped.
• T - Temparory.
• W - Pending approval.
• X - Cancelled.
• Y - Private requisition list.
• Z – Sharable requisition list.

Order Flow Process For Consumer Direct Store

Consumer Direct Order flow Process:

Place an order. A customer or an administrator who has the authority to act on behalf of the customer places an order with the store. Placing an order involves browsing the online catalog, selecting one or more products for the order, and providing billing, shipping, and offline payment information. Once the customer or administrator completes the order checkout, the order moves from P state (pending with products in the shopping cart) to M state (pending payment approval).

Approve payment for the order. Once the order has been placed, the next step is to approve payment for the order, using WebSphere Commerce Payments. Offline payments are automatically approved and the order moves from M state (pending payment approval) to C state (approved and ready to be released to fulfillment).

Release the order to fulfillment.

Create a pick batch for all orders released to the specified fulfillment center. Pick batches must be created for all fulfillment centers, including the channel store. Once you receive the products from the channel store, you can then pick and pack them for delivery to customers. All releases for the selected fulfillment center are placed in one batch; pick slips are created for each pick batch and packing slips are generated for the releases.

View and print pick ticket.

View and print packaging slip.

Pick and pack products specified in the pick ticket and packaging slip. Products specified in the pick ticket are then manually picked from the fulfillment center, and products are packed according to the instructions in the packing slips.

Create package.

Ship goods. Ship the order to the customer.

Confirm shipment has been sent.

Confirm Shipment. Once you have verified the shipment on the system, the status of the order changes to Shipped.

Note:

1. Pick Ticket: A printed document containing a list of all the products required to fulfill the releases in a given pick batch.

2. Pick Batch: A group of releases that are managed as a unit in a fulfillment center.

3. Fulfillment Center: Serves as a storage warehouse where products are packed & shipped to customers.

Commerce Exceptions

Class Summary
ECApplicationException	This class defines the exceptions thrown by the WebSphere Commerce Application Server when application errors occur during the processing of business logic.
ECException	This is an abstract base class used for defining exceptions thrown by the WebSphere Commerce Application Server.
ECParameterError	This class is a specialization of the service parameter error that uses an ECMessage to populate the error object.
ECSystemException	This class defines the exceptions thrown by the WebSphere Commerce Application Server when system errors occur during processing.
ExceptionHandler	This class contains methods & helper methods for converting Exception objects to ECException objects and generating ECException objects.
InvalidParameterValueException	This class defines the exception thrown by the WebSphere Commerce Application Server when a parameter error occurs.
ParameterNotFoundException	This class defines the exception thrown by the WebSphere Commerce Application Server when a parameter not provided by the client.

Details about Access Control Policies.

An Access Control Policies authorizes a group of users to perform a set of actions on a set of resources.

An access control policy has 4 elements, they are:

1.User.

2.Action.

3.Resource.

4.Relationship.

User: The Users are the people that use the system. For access control purposes, users must be grouped into relevant access groups.

Action: Actions are the activities that users can perform on the resource.

Resource: Resources are the entities that are protected. A resource group might include business objects like contract or order, or a set of related commands.

Relationship: Relationships are the relationship between the user and the resource. Access control policies may require that a relationship between the user and the resource be satisfied. Each resource class can have a set of relationships associated with it. Each resource can have a set of users that fulfill each relationship.

There are 2 types of access control policies, they are:

1.Groupable standard policies(policy type-2).

2.Groupable template policies(policy type-3).

A groupable standard policy is applied, once, at organizations that subscribe to a policy group that contains the policy.

Groupable template policies are dynamic in nature in that they have an access group that is scoped, when the system is running, to the organization that owns the resource.

The table updated in access control poliies are:

1.ACACTION: Stores actions that are to be performed on the resources in the system.

2.ACPOLICY: Stores all the access control policies in a system.

3.ACRESGRP: Stores all access control resource groups in a system.

4.ACPOLDESC: Stores local specific information for ACPOLICY.

5.ACRELATION: Relation between resources and members in system.

6.ACRESREL: Associates a resource and relationships that it supports.

WebSphere Commerce allows you to determine, through access control, which tasks a particular user, be they customers, buyers, administrators, distributors, manufacturers, or suppliers, can perform in relation to your business.

To facilitate database management and ensure security, access to WebSphere Commerce must be restricted to specific individuals and organizations. The process of restricting access is referred to as access control or authorization. Authorization can be defined as security guidelines that:

1. Allow or deny a user of a system access to the resources managed by a system.
2. Specify what actions the user can perform on each resource.

The authorization model for WebSphere Commerce is based upon the enforcement of access control policies. Access control policies are enforced by the access control Policy Manager. In general, when a user attempts to access a protected resource, the access control policy manager first determines what access control policies are applicable for that user and then, based upon the applicable access control policies, it determines if the user is allowed to perform the requested operation on the given resource.

The Site Administrator manages the access control policies that apply to a site or store.

Details about Beans Present in WCS..

Data Bean

A data bean is a java bean that is used within a jsp page to provide dynamic contect to the jsp page. A data bean normally provides a simple representaion of a WebSphere Commerce Entity bean.

There are 3 types of data beans:

1.Smart databean.

2.Command databean

3. Input data bean

• Smart data bean: When a smart data bean is activated, the data bean manager invokes the data bean's populate method. Using the populate method, the data bean can retrieve all attributes, except attributes from associated objects.
• Command data bean: A data bean implementing the CommandDataBean interface retrieves data from a data bean command. A data bean of this type is a lightweight object; it relies on a data bean command to populate its data. The data bean must implement the getCommandInterfaceName() method which returns the interface name of the data bean command.
• Input data bean: A data bean implementing the InputDataBean interface retrieves data from the URL parameters or attributes set by the view.

Attributes defined in this interface can be used as primary key fields to fetch additional data. When a JSP page is invoked, the generated JSP servlet code populates all the attributes that match the URL parameters, and then activates the data bean by passing the data bean to the data bean manager. The data bean manager then invokes the data bean's setRequestProperties() method (as defined by the com.ibm.commerce.InputDataBean interface) to pass all the attributes set by the view.

Access Bean

WCS commands interact with access beans rather than directly with the entity beans. Access beans behave like Java beans, & hide all enterprize bean-specific programming interfaces from the client.

Types of Access beans are:

1. Copy Helper methods.

2. Finder methods.

3. EJB methods.

There are 2 types of Copy Helper methods:

1. refreshCopyHelper()

2. commitCopyHelper()

refreshCopyHelper(): refresh copy helper is treated as "find for update” and it locks that particular row unless or until you are done with entire transaction. So you read something with refreshcopyHelper and you keep doing n no of things and when you are finally done then only these locks are released.

refreshCopyHelper reads the database to update the access bean.

commitCopyHelper(): commitCopyHelper() takes the current state of the access bean and updates the database with it.

Updates the database with the contents of the access bean.

Entity Bean: The persistence layer within the WebSphere Commerce architecture is implemented according to the EJB component architecture.

A small number of stateless session beans are used to handle intensive database operations, such as performing a sum of all the rows in a particular column. One advantage of using entity beans is that developers can utilize the EJB tools provided in WebSphere Commerce Developer. These tools allow developers to define Java objects and their database table mappings. The tools automatically generate the required persisters for the entity beans. Persisters are Java objects that persist Java fields to the database and populate Java fields with data from the database.