ATG Made Easy - part 6

ATG Commerce
2 versions: ATG Consumer Commerce is used for developing standard business-to-consumer (B2C) online stores. ATG Business Commerce is used for sites oriented more toward business-to-business (B2B) uses.

1) Product Catalog & Custom Catalog:
The product catalog is a collection of repository items (categories, products, media, etc.) that provides the organizational framework for your commerce site. ATG Commerce includes a standard catalog implementation, based on the ATG SQL Repository, that you can use or extend as necessary.

The structure is built on Catalog --> Category --> Product --> Sku
Where you can modify the features of each level.
The most important is to have the parent flag in the top categories
Each level has parent/child attributes, eg. parentCategories, childSku's for product level.
You can have a linked template to display the element using it.
Some dropletes are dedicated on loading these elements: ItemLookupDroplet (generic) versus CategoryLookupDroplet, ProductLookupDroplet and SKULookupDroplet.
They take id as input and product the item/elements as output.

MediaLookupDroplet for Media , 2 types exist: Media Internal and External (internally referenced versus URL/File)
The data property is either binary (for media-internal-binary items) or text (for media-internal-text items)

ATG catalogs use several batch and dynamic services to perform catalog updates and to verify catalog relationships. These services are collectively referred to as the Catalog Maintenance System (CMS). The CMS updates property values that enable navigation and hierarchical search. It also verifies the relationships of catalog repository items and properties.
**Batch Services : as
• AncestorGeneratorService
• CatalogVerificationService
• CatalogUpdateService
• CatalogMaintenanceService
Each service creates a global lock at the start of execution, using the global lock management, and releases it upon completion. This prevents services that use the same lock name from executing simultaneously on the same server, or other servers in the cluster.
**Dynamic Services : as
• CatalogChangesListener
• CatalogCompletionService
• StandardCatalogCompletionService

Note that some of these services are available only for custom catalogs; others for both standard and
custom catalogs.

2) Order Management:
A session scoped component which is ShoppingCart (atg/commerce/ShoppingCart) manage the current order (+last order and saved orders), order stored in memory and persisted frequently..
You can configure and customize it using orderrepositiory.xml (where you can define its components, cache size and lock mode).
Once Sku is added to the order-->it become CommerceItem that is related to ShoppingGroup that is related to ShippingAddress and ShippingMethod.
Once order is submitted , it become in incomplete status ---> further processing --> fulfilled.
In case of B2B, order is hold for the needed approvals.
Once good feature exist in ATG Commerce, is the ability to have scheduled order.

Payment methods include: Credit card, Store credit, gift certificate, invoice request (in B2B)

CartModifierFormHandler: Request scope
A form handler to handle adding items to order, remove items, change quantity, move the order forward (payment, shipping info),

StoreCartFormHandler:
Handles continue shopping, expressCheckout, update, ....etc...

*Business Layer:
-CommerceItemManager:
Create, add to order, remove from order..
Once sku is added to the order : sku id--> catalog ref Id in CommerceItem object, quantity , priceInfo , paymentGroup and shippingGroup are taken as well.

-OrderManager:
load/save, create , allocate order to payment group.
These operations are handled by pipelines as mentioned before when we discuss the pipelines.
-OrderTools:
Provides low level raw operations..
-PurchaseProcessHelper:
Centralized functionality for purchase operations.

*Best Practise for Order Updating:
1.Acquire lock-manager write lock on profile id from the /atg/commerce/order/LocalLockManager
2.Begin Transaction
3.Synchronize on the Order object.
4.Modify Order
5.Call ((OrderImpl) pOrder).updateVersion();
6.Call OrderManager.updateOrder()
7.Release Order synchronization
8.End Transaction
9.Release lock-manager write lock on profile id from the /atg/commerce/order/LocalLockManager


3) Purchasing and Fulfillment Services :
ATG Commerce provides tools to handle pre-checkout order-processing tasks such as adding items to a shopping cart, ensuring items are shipped by the customer’s preferred method, and validating credit card information. The system is designed for flexibility and easy customization; you can create sites that support multiple shopping carts for a single user, multiple payment methods and shipping addresses.
You can integrate with third-party authorization and settlement tools such as Payflow Pro, CyberSource, and TAXWARE.

4) Inventory Management :
The inventory framework facilitates inventory querying and inventory management for your site.
InventoryManager
The InventoryManager is a public interface that contains all of the Inventory system functionality. Each method described below returns an integer status code. All successful return codes should be greater than or equal to zero, all failure codes should be less than zero. By default, the codes are:
INVENTORY_STATUS_SUCCEED=0 There was no problem performing the operation.
INVENTORY_STATUS_FAIL=-1 There was an unknown/generic problem performing the operation.
INVENTORY_STATUS_INSUFFICIENT_SUPPLY = -2 The operation couldn’t be completed because there were not enough of the item in the inventory system.
INVENTORY_STATUS_ITEM_NOT_FOUND = -3 The operation could not be completed
because a specified item could not be found in the inventory system.

ATG Commerce includes the following implementations of the InventoryManager out of the box.
• AbstractInventoryManagerImpl
• NoInventoryManager
• RepositoryInventoryManager
• CachingInventoryManager
• LocalizingInventoryManager

Preventing Inventory Deadlocks
InventoryManager includes the acquireInventoryLocks and releaseInventoryLocks methods.
acquireInventoryLocks acquires locks for the inventory items that apply to the given IDs.
releaseInventoryLocks releases locks for the inventory items that apply to the given IDs.

5) Pricing Services :
ATG Commerce pricing services revolve around pricing engines and pricing calculators.
**The pricing engine determines the correct pricing model for an order, individual item, shipping charge, or tax, based on a customer’s profile.
**The pricing calculator performs the actual price calculation based on information
from the pricing engine.

Pricing engines are responsible for three tasks:
• Retrieving any promotions that are available to the site visitor.
• Determining which calculators generate the price.
• Invoking the calculators in the correct order.

Pricing calculators are responsible for the following:
• Looking up the price in the catalog by priceList.
• Invoking a qualifier service that identifies the objects to discount.
• Using information they receive from the engines and from the qualifier service to
perform the actual process of determining prices.

By default, ATG Commerce can perform dynamic pricing for the following types of pricing object:
• Items. Each item has a list price that can be specified in the listPrice property of the Product Catalog repository.(Note that an “item” is a CommerceItem, which represents a quantity of a SKU or a product).
• Orders.
• Shipping price.
• Tax.

Terminology:
-Qualifier : This is a service that interprets a PMDL rule and decides what, if
anything, may be discounted. The term qualifier also refers to the first part of a PMDL rule. This rule defines when something can receive a discount.
- Target : The second part of a PMDL rule is called the target. This rule
defines which part of an order receives a discount.

4 Types of PriceInfo objects:
OrderPriceInfo,ItemPriceInfo, ShippingPriceInfo, and TaxPriceInfo

How this works?
1-Invokation to price engine from business-layer logic, such as a PriceItem servlet
bean in a page or from the ATG Commerce PricingTools class.
2-Pricing engine applies its configured precalculators. A precalculator modifies a
price without using any associated promotions.
3-Pricing engine accesses the current customer’s profile and retrieves any
promotions listed in the activePromotions property of the profile
4-Pricing engine builds a list of global promotions and concatenate them.
5-Pricing engine applies promotions by priority (each promotion has pricingCalculatorService property that specifies the calculator that the system must use to apply it)
6-The pricing engine applies its configured PostCalculators.
7-The pricing engine modifies the PriceInfo object of the object being discounted.

-When building a product catalog, you must decide whether your site requires dynamic product pricing and, if so, how granular you need it to be. Using dynamic pricing on a product page can cause a significant decrease in performance compared to using static pricing..

-With static pricing, each item in the catalog has a list price stored in the listPrice property of the catalog repository.
Volume Pricing: Bulk 100 at 10, 200 at 9, ...etc..
or Tiered: 1st 100->10 , 2nd 100 -->9 , ...
Static uses 2 droplets: PriceDroplet and PriceRangeDroplet.

**PriceEngine:
atg.commerce.pricing.PricingEngine is the main interface for interacting with the
atg.commerce.pricing package. Extensions of this interface describe objects that calculate a price for a specific class of object. For example, OrderPricingEngine extends PricingEngine and calculates prices for orders passed to it.

All PricingEngine implementations process promotions. The PricingEngine interface itself contains only one method, getPricingModels, which extracts a collection of promotions from an input profile. (Price Model can be customized by priceModel.xml).
The PricingEngine interface itself does not describe any functionality other than the promotion extraction API because of the wide range of information that different PricingEngine implementations might require to calculate a price for their specific class of object. For example, the ItemPricingEngine implementation needs one set of input parameters, while the OrderPricingEngine needs a different set.

The individual extensions of the PricingEngine interface contain the API methods for generating a given type of price. There is a Java object type for each type of price that is generated. For example,atg.commerce.pricing.OrderPricingEngine inherits the promotion extraction API from PricingEngine and defines one new method, priceOrder, to generate a price for an order in a given context.

ATG Commerce provides the following four extensions of the main PricingEngine interface:
• atg.commerce.pricing.ItemPricingEngine
Provides a price for atg.commerce.order.CommerceItem objects.
• atg.commerce.pricing.OrderPricingEngine
Provides a price for atg.commerce.order.Order objects.
• atg.commerce.pricing.ShippingPricingEngine
Provides a price for atg.commerce.order.ShippingGroup objects.
• atg.commerce.pricing.TaxPricingEngine
Determines tax for atg.commerce.order.Order objects.

PricingTools Class
The atg.commerce.pricing.PricingTools class performs a variety of pricing functions for different types of pricing engines. It also has a number of static, currency-related methods for use by all pricing engines.
The PricingTools class is the main way that business-layer logic interacts with the pricing engines and the other classes in the atg.commerce.pricing package.

The properties of PricingTools are as follows:
• itemPricingEngine: The pricing engine that calculates prices for items, both
individually and in groups. An item is identified as a set quantity of a SKU or product.
• orderPricingEngine: The pricing engine that calculates prices for orders. Typically,
the price is just the sum of the prices of the items in the order. However, the order
might be discounted separately from the constituent items.
• shippingPricingEngine: The pricing engine that calculates prices for shipping
groups. An order contains one or more shipping groups when the contents of the
order require shipping for delivery. An order has no shipping groups when it is
delivered online, and shipping is therefore not calculated for this type of order.
• taxPricingEngine: The pricing engine that calculates tax for orders. Tax is calculated
on the order total.
• roundingDecimalPlaces: Specifies the number of decimal places to which the an
input price is rounded . This property is used by the round, roundDown and
needsRounding methods.

Important Methods:
priceEachItem, priceItem, priceItemsForOrderTotal, priceOrderForOrderTotal, priceOrderTotal, priceShippingForOrderTotal, priceTaxForOrderTotal, needsRounding, round.

The Pricing Servlet Beans : You can insert on site pages as required and use to
perform dynamic pricing.
• AvailableShippingMethods Servlet Bean
• ItemPricingDroplet Servlet Bean
• PriceEachItem Servlet Bean
• PriceItem Servlet Bean
• PriceDroplet Servlet Bean
• ComplexPriceDroplet Servlet Bean

*Price Lists:
Price Lists allow you to target a specific set of prices to a specific group of customers.
The PriceListManager class maintains the price lists. A price may be retrieved from the PriceListManager from a given price list by product, by SKU, or by a product/SKU pair.
The most important method in PriceListManager is getPrice. This is used during pricing of an order to get the correct price for a given product/SKU pair.

It is configured using priceList.xml

6) Targeted Promotions :
Business managers can use ATG Commerce promotions to highlight products and offer discounts as a way of encouraging customers to make purchases.

Promotions 3 types: ItemDiscount, OrderDiscount and ShippingDiscount.

Pricing Model Description Language (PMDL): rule describing the conditions under which this promotion should take effect. The rule is created in the ATG Control Center using the interface designed for promotion creation.

7) Order Management Web Services :
All order management web services are included in commerceWebServices.ear in the
orderManagement.war web application.

Reference: ATG Platform documentation set : Version 9.1 - 7/31/09