Take the community feedback survey now.

Quan Mai
Jan 17, 2018
  4534
(9 votes)

CartHelper is dead, long live IOrderRepository

As a framework provider, we take backward compatibilities seriously, and we keep supporting public APIs as long as it makes senses. If we can improve our framework by changing the internal implementation without having to change the singatures, we'll go with that.

But sometimes, to improve, we need to leave old APIs behind.

CartHelper is one of the oldest APIs in Episerver Commerce framework, and while it's convenient to use, it has several major drawbacks:

  • It ties to other "legacy" APIs, such as Entry, which are less then elegant to use .
  • It is tightly coupled with the concrete implementation (Cart, OrderForm, etc.), so it's impossible to switch to the new serializable cart mode for better performance. 
  • It is hard, if not impossible to unit test.
  • It always creates new carts if none exists, even if you don't really need them

We already introduced the new abstraction APIs - IOrderRepository, IOrderGroup, ICart... from Commerce 9.19, and fully recommend to use those new APIs to handle carts and orders. New abstraction APIs solves all of the problems above, and yet you have nicer, better looking code. There is no reason to keep using CartHelper now.

In Commerce 11.6.1, we push the recommendation further. CartHelper is now obsoleted and will be removed in a forseeable future - it will be removed in the first major release after Jan 2019.

As always, you should move away from obsoleted APIs, instead of ignoring the warnings with #pragma directives. For CartHelper, the migration path is clear, IOrderRepository is simply the better, future-proof way to go.

CartHelper is dead, long live IOrderRepository!

Jan 17, 2018

Comments

Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Create a Simple home page in Optimizely CMS

  Introduction In this blog post, I will walk you through a step by step process to create a very basic home page on a Optimizley CMS Empty site....

Ratish | Sep 7, 2025 |

AEO, GEO and SEO with Epicweb AI-Assistant in Optimizely

As search evolves beyond traditional SEO, businesses must adapt to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). This...

Luc Gosso (MVP) | Sep 7, 2025 |

Meet the newest OMVPs – summer 2025 cohort

We’re excited to welcome the latest group of Optimizely Most Valuable Professionals (OMVPs) into the program! This summer’s cohort highlights a ble...

Satata Satez | Sep 5, 2025

The Sweet Spot: Hybrid Headless Architecture

When it comes to content management architecture, the pendulum often swings between tightly coupled “headed” CMS setups and the flexibility of full...

Minesh Shah (Netcel) | Sep 4, 2025