Commerce Engine overview
The Commerce Engine is a thin ASP.NET Core application that serves as a host for a group of micro-services that enable commerce functionality. These services are loosely coupled with each other and together, they provide a robust, extensible set of commerce-enabling services.
Services exposed from the engine are exposed as OData/REST based APIs. This enables either direct REST calls to the services, or calls through a generated smart proxy, which examines OData metadata and generates a strongly typed experience for accessing the service.
The initial out-of-the-box Commerce Engine is provided as part of the Sitecore XC SDK. It enables a developer to extend their solution by choosing which plugins are enabled in their solution. Plugins can be retrieved from:
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the set of plugins provided with the product
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Sitecore partners
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Public plugins downloaded from a NuGet feed
The Commerce Engine provided in the SDK is called the Customer.Sample.Solution. You can open the Commerce solution in Visual Studio 2017. The SDK contains the Commerce Engine project itself and some sample plugins that demonstrate a typical extension of the solution.
When you extend the Sitecore XC solution, you:
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Open the Customer.Sample.Solution.
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Rename the solution to something more appropriate for your needs.
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Click F5 to refresh the solution to ensure that the initial solution runs.
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Exercise the solution through the Postman samples or using the sample Console app.
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Extend the solution by creating additional plugins as separate projects within the solution using a strong separation of concerns.
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Test your plugin using a combination of unit tests and functional tests.
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When the solution meets requirements, create a new deployment for the solution
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Send the new deployment through any QA or DevOps process to get the deployment deployed to production.