K Khan
OMVPPaaS CMS Administrator Certification
May 15, 2015
visibility 3977
star star star star star
(0 votes)

Hook into commerce catalog events

"The possibilities for integrating EPiServer with other systems are virtually unlimited". A customer requires all the changes of EPiServer Commerce Products done by CMS Editors in Online Centre’s catalog UI, back into their fulfilment system. EPiServer provides a number of features to facilitate Integration with outer systems.  I will use .NET API’s catalog events to react changes to catalog items. This can be achieved by adding handlers for IContentEvents, CatalogEventHandler, CatalogEventBroadcaster or can create own implementation of CatalogEventListenerBase and hook the events such as EntryUpdating or EntryUpdated. 


IContentEvents: Events will not be raised when a catalog item is updated through Commerce Manager or in Integration Application using ICatalogSystem.
CatalogEventHandler: Events will not be raised when changes done directly through ICatalogSystem only.
CatalogEventBroadcaster: Events will be raised when changes are done through ICatalogSystem, including changes made through the Content API's.
(IContentEvents are in my scope)

We can register events in our Commerce Initialization module, e.g.

[InitializableModule, ModuleDependency(typeof(EPiServer.Commerce.Initialization.InitializationModule))]
    public class CommerceInitialization : IConfigurableModule
    {
///
        public void Initialize(InitializationEngine context)
        {
              var contenEventHandler = EPiServer.ServiceLocation.ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<EPiServer.Core.IContentEvents>();
            contenEventHandler.PublishedContent += this.ContenEventPublishedContent;
        }

///
    }

I am using ValueInjector (convention based mapper) to map Product meta class with OdooProduct.

private void ContenEventPublishedContent(object sender, ContentEventArgs e)
        {
            var product = e.Content as XYZ.BusinessModel.Models.MetaData.FashionProduct;
            if (product != null)
            {
                log4net.LogManager.GetLogger("EntryUpdate").Error(product.AgeFromInYears);
                //used value injector
                var odooProduct = 
                Mapper.AddMap<XYZ.BusinessModel.Models.MetaData.FashionProduct, OdooProduct>(src =>
                {
                    var res = new OdooProduct();
                    res.InjectFrom(src); // maps properties with same name and type
                    res.Name = src.DisplayName;
                    res.AgeFrom = src.AgeFromInYears;
                    return res;
                });
                // Update product details on fulfillment center
                fulfilmentService.UpdateProduct(odooProduct);
            }            
        }

and That's It.

May 15, 2015

Comments

valdis
valdis May 16, 2015 10:21 AM

I'm considering to expose Commerce events down to client-side through SignalR. Is that something useful? Would client be interested in catalog changes happening on the server?

May 17, 2015 07:10 PM

Bundle of thanks Champ for pointing out this extension point, I confess, I haven’t consider SignalR while writing this Blog. Anyway it isn’t in scope of work as they are not exposing their catalog/events to any client and these weren’t high frequency changes. We need to inform changes of few fields to an already working web service on a third party system only.

K Khan
K Khan May 17, 2015 07:13 PM

I have just noticed comments can be added as guest also :) , I own above comments.

error Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Surviving a Dirty Feed. Part 3: Error Handling and Event Batching

Committing a 250,000-row Optimizely catalog import row by row, returning a per-row failure report, and coalescing catalog events into one per batch.

Stanisław Szołkowski | Oct 16, 2026 |

Building UI Extensions for Optimizely SaaS CMS

Introduction Developers have been extending the functionality of Optimizely PaaS CMS for years using addons built in C# and deployed as NuGet...

Mark Stott | Oct 15, 2026

Cheapskate AI Translator: Because Translation Should Not Require a Second Mortgage

There is a particular kind of software project that begins with a detailed architecture document, a product roadmap, and a carefully assembled...

Linh Doan Cuu | Oct 15, 2026

Computed Fields in CMS 13 Content Contracts with Optimizely Graph

Content Contracts in Optimizely CMS 13 allow different content types to share a common structure when querying Optimizely Graph. But what if the...

Mardy | Oct 14, 2026