New events for price and inventory updates

We hear you! Customers of Commerce have been requesting the ability to fire and/or listen to events when there are changes in prices and inventories. In the upcoming Commerce - version 8.15, we will provide new APIs to let you do that with ease.

Important note: The API:s have been slightly revised in 8.16, so this post was updated to reflect the changes, as we highly recommed you to upgrade to latest Commerce version. 

Listening to new events from price and inventory system

you'll need to implement a class two methods, which take the relevant arguments:

        public void PriceUpdated(object sender, PriceUpdateEventArgs args)

        {

        //Your action when the prices are updated

        }

        public void InventoryUpdated(object sender, InventoryUpdateEventArgs args)

        {

        //Your action when the inventories records are updated.

        }

The sender in case of PriceUpdated is a IEnumerable<IPriceValue>, while
in InventoryUpdated is a IEnumerable<InventoryRecord>

To process remote events, you will need to get the event from EPiServer Framework event, like this:

    public void AddEvent()

    {

        Event ev = Event.Get(CatalogKeyEventBroadcaster.CatalogKeyEventGuid);

        ev.Raised += CatalogKeyEventUpdated;

    }

 

    private void CatalogKeyEventUpdated(object sender, EventNotificationEventArgs e)

    {

        var eventArgs = (CatalogKeyEventArgs)DeSerialize((byte[])e.Param);

        var priceUpdatedEventArgs = eventArgs as PriceUpdateEventArgs;

        if (priceUpdatedEventArgs != null)

        {

            RemotePriceUpdated(sender, priceUpdatedEventArgs);

            return;

        }

        var inventoryUpdatedEventArgs = eventArgs as InventoryUpdateEventArgs;

        if (inventoryUpdatedEventArgs != null)

        {

            RemoteInventoryUpdated(sender, inventoryUpdatedEventArgs);

        }

    }

 

    private void RemoteInventoryUpdated(object sender, InventoryUpdateEventArgs inventoryUpdatedEventArgs)

    {

        //Your action when inventories are updated remotely.

    }

 

    private void RemotePriceUpdated(object sender, PriceUpdateEventArgs priceUpdatedEventArgs)

    {

        //Your action when prices are updated remotely.

    }

You can only get the affected CatalogKey list from remote events, so it can be used to validate cache and so on.

And then register that new class into system. This should be done in an IInitializationModule, so you can start listening to the events when your site start:

In public void Initialize(InitializationEngine context) method:

        var broadcaster = context.Locate.Advanced.GetInstance<CatalogKeyEventBroadcaster>();

        var listener = context.Locate.Advanced.GetInstance<CatalogKeyEventListener>();

        listener.AddEvent();

        broadcaster.InventoryUpdated += listener.InventoryUpdated;

        broadcaster.PriceUpdated += listener.PriceUpdated;

Where CatalogKeyEventListener is your class which implements those methods above.

Broadcasting new events:

When prices or inventories are saved through our default implementation, those events will be fired automatically. If you have custom implementation of one of those interfaces, and you wish to let other parts of system know when there are changes in prices and inventories, you will need to fire your event in your implementation.

To broadcast the events, use CatalogKeyEventBroadcaster class. This class has two public methods for firing events:

   public virtual void OnPriceUpdated(object source, PriceUpdateEventArgs args)

   public virtual void OnInventoryUpdated(object source, InventoryUpdateEventArgs args)

After the changes are made to your price/inventory system, you can call to approriate method to raise an event. For example, to fire event in your price system implemenation, add this in your SetCatalogEntryPrices(IEnumerable<CatalogKey> catalogKeys, IEnumerable<IPriceValue> priceValues) method:

    _broadcaster.OnPriceUpdated(<list of prices changed>, new PriceUpdateEventArgs(catalogKeys.ToList()));

_broadcaster is an instance of CatalogKeyEventBroadcaster, which can be injected to your class via constructor dependency.

We're listening.

Those new API:s are marked as BETA, becase while we're quite happy with it, we want to hear more feedbacks from you. Let's know what you do want and what you don't, so we can adapt and make better API:s for you.