Mar 3, 2016
visibility 3294
star star star star star
(2 votes)

How to listen to remote Commerce events

This will be a quick tips for people who want to listen to external Commerce events. I have a perculiar situation where I via the Service API import my products, but the service API isn't hosted on the same site/server as my site, but on a separate one instead. This means that I can't listen to local events like I would normally and will have to listen to remote events. But is there such events for Commerce? I know that Episerver sends remote events for cache invalidations, so maybe they send events for Commerce event too.

To listen to local Commerce events you can create your own implementation of CatalogEventListenerBase and one of the out of the box implementation of this abstract class is the CatalogEventBroadcaster. This class will take the local event and send out remote events that we can listen to! So to solve my problem I implemented the following in a IConfigurableModule.

	[ModuleDependency(typeof(ServiceContainerInitialization))]
	public class CatalogEventListener : IConfigurableModule
	{
		public void Initialize(EpiserverCommerce.Framework.Initialization.InitializationEngine context)
		{
			Event ev = Event.Get(CatalogEventBroadcaster.CommerceProductUpdated);
			ev.Raised += Ev_Raised;
		}

		private void Ev_Raised(object sender, EpiserverCommerce.Events.EventNotificationEventArgs e)
		{
			if (!(e.Param is Byte[])) return;
			var eventArgs = DeSerialize(e.Param as Byte[]);
			// Care only about catalog entry events
			var catalogEvents = eventArgs as CatalogContentUpdateEventArgs;
			if (catalogEvents == null || !catalogEvents.CatalogEntryIds.Any()) return;

			switch (catalogEvents.EventType)
			{
				case Mediachase.Commerce.Catalog.Events.CatalogEventBroadcaster.CatalogEntryUpdatedEventType:
					catalogEvents.CatalogEntryIds.ForEach(entryId => UpdateIndex(entryId));
					break;
				default:
					break;
			}
		}

		private static EventArgs DeSerialize(byte[] buffer)
		{
			var formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
			using (var stream = new MemoryStream(buffer))
			{
				return formatter.Deserialize(stream) as EventArgs;
			}
		}		
	}

Big thanks to Quan Mai for helping me find the right class!

Mar 03, 2016

Comments

Vincent
Vincent Jul 14, 2016 02:43 AM

Thanks, Toni. I recently experienced the same issue, Quan pointed me to your blog post. 

error Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Parallel Development in Optimizely CMS SaaS: Shifting to a Schema Migration Mindset

  Part 3 of the Parallel Development series. The branch-scoped push script from Part 1 works. Run it on a feature branch where you've touched a...

Vipin Banka | Jul 25, 2026

From AI Agents to AI Workflow with Opal

Introduction In the first article in this series , we talked about AI agents in Optimizely Opal and walked through the process of creating a...

Igor Safonov | Jul 23, 2026

Building Your First Optimizely Opal AI Agent: a Hands-On Walkthrough

Introduction There's a common assumption that building an AI agent is something only engineers or developers can do. It isn't. At the Optimizely AN...

Igor Safonov | Jul 23, 2026

Advanced Task Manager Gets a Big Update

One of the things I keep coming back to with Optimizely's content approval workflow is that it's solid at the individual level - you know a piece o...

Adnan Zameer | Jul 21, 2026 |