Sitecore Commerce Connect Release Notes (August 2016)

Release notes for Sitecore Commerce Connect. Contains information on late breaking developments, known issues, and workarounds

  1. What's New

    Commerce reports in Experience Analytics

    New commerce related reports have been added to Experience Analytics. 40+ charts on 13 new commerce reports have been introduced with Sitecore Commerce Connect, which covers:
    1. Overview
    2. Orders
    3. Campaigns
    4. Products
    5. Categories
    6. Customers
    7. Shopping cart activity
    8. Filtering and sorting
    9. Regional Settings
    10. Internal search
    11. Payment and shipping
    12. Wish lists
    13. Loyalty programs

    For more information about the new reports, go to http://doc.sitecore.net.

    Federated Payment Support

    New methods, a repository interface and implementation, and new object types have been added to the Payment service layer. For more information, go to the Sitecore Commerce Connect Developer Guide on http://doc.sitecore.net.

    Federated Payment is now supported in the StarterKit storefront, and a sample Federated Payment service has been included for testing purposes with the Commerce Connect StarterKit on GitHub.

    Federated Payment is now supported in the Reference Storefront for Sitecore Commerce powered by Microsoft Dynamics AX 7 through Sitecore Commerce Connect.

    AuthenticationTokenProvider

    To support authentication by using tokens in all of the Commerce Connect APIs, an AuthenticationTokenProvider has been introduced. It consists of an interface defined in Sitecore.Commerce.Config and a default implementation which always returns NULL, meaning no token is provided.

    The introduction of the provider centralizes the logic of providing the Token. The base class ServiceProviderRequest that is used in all service methods as input parameter has been extended with an AuthenticationToken property. The property can be set explicitly on every call made through Connect. If the property is not set, the AuthenticationTokenProvider is instantiated and called, and the return value is assigned to the property.

    The AuthenticationToken is defined as a class that can be customized for extensibility purposes. For more information, go to the Sitecore Commerce Connect Developer Guide on http://doc.sitecore.net.

    The Sitecore Commerce powered by Microsoft Dynamics AX7 solution contains an implementation of the AuthenticationTokenProvider in support of Federated Authentication.

    ShopProvider

    ShopProvider has been introduced to support multiple shops across all of the APIs. It consists of an interface defined in Sitecore.Commerce.Config and a default implementation that returns the shop context in the form of the name of the current Site as defined by Sitecore.Context.Site.Name.

    The introduction of the provider centralizes the logic of providing the shop context. The base class ServiceProviderRequest that is used in all service methods as input parameter has been extended with a Shop property. The property can be set explicitly on every call made through Connect. If the property is not set, the ShopProvider is instantiated and called, and the return value is assigned to the property.

    The Shop context is defined as a class that can be customized for extensibility purposes.

    For more information, go to the Sitecore Commerce Connect Developer Guide on http://doc.sitecore.net.

  2. Compatibility

    Sitecore Experience Platform 8.2.

    To upgrade from a previous release, review the Breaking Changes section in this document, and install the new versions of all packages.

  3. Resolved Issues

    There are no resolved issues at this time.

  4. Known Issues

    Contact charts in Customers reports are showing a mix of IDs

    Anonymous contacts get assigned a GUID by Sitecore, therefore GUIDs are present in the charts whenever an anonymous contact has done a checkout and placed an order.

    Customer charts in Customers reports are empty when running SCpbMD

    Sitecore Commerce Powered by Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail (SCpbMD) is not populating the CustomerID property in the Commerce Connect order domain model, which is used in the reports.

    Contact charts in Customers reports are empty when running SCpbCS

    Sitecore Commerce Powered by Commerce Server(SCpbCS) is not populating the UserID property in the Commerce Connect order domain model, which is used in the reports.

    Risk of interger overflow in Experience Analytics

    Seven Experience Analytics metrics were repurposed, and are based on a signed integer type. Because of this, there is an upper numeric limit of 2^31-1. This means that monetary values are rounded off or truncated, and have a positive upper limit of 147.483.647. In situations with large amounts of incoming orders or orders that contain a large amount of expensive items, there is a risk that someone will reach that upper limit, and as a result see incorrect numbers.