Commerce Engine policies

A policy set is a file that contains a collection of policies, with a specific configuration. You use policy sets to group policies that you want to use in more than one environment, so that you do not need to repeat the same policy configuration in each environment JSON file.

The Sitecore XC solution includes the following default policy set files in the Commerce Engine SDK.*.zip package, in the wwwroot\data\Environments folder:

To ensure that a Commerce environment inherits the behavior defined in a particular policy set, you must include a reference to that policy set in the environment's JSON file.

For example, to apply caching behavior specified in the global Caching policy set to a specific environment, you add an entry for that policy set in the Policies collection of the environment JSON file (for example, Plugin.Habitat.CommerceShops.1.0.0.json), as follows:

   {
     "$type": "Sitecore.Commerce.Core.PolicySetPolicy, Sitecore.Commerce.Core",
        "PolicySetId": "Entity-PolicySet-CachingPolicySet"
   },

You define policy configuration for a single environment, by adding a policy to the environment's configuration (JSON) file.

For example, the Carts plugin includes policies that govern cart behavior. One policy, the CalculateCart policy, determines whether (and when) the Commerce Engine recalculates a cart total. Promotions, line prices, shipping costs, or other cart operations affect the cart total. For optimized performance, particularly in a Shops environment, the AlwaysCalculate parameter is set to false by default.

However, in an Authoring environment, you might want to enable the AlwaysCalculate parameter so that a business user can test a new promotion, for example, and ensure that any discounts are applied to the cart total correctly, in real time.

To enable the parameter for the Authoring environment only, you would add an instance of the Calculate Cart policy to the Policies collection in the environment JSON file (for example, Plugin.Habitat.CommerceAuthoring.json) and set the AlwaysCalculate parameter to true as follows:

  {
    "$type": "Sitecore.Commerce.Plugin.Carts.CalculateCartPolicy, Sitecore.Commerce.Plugin.Carts",
        "AlwaysCalculate": true
  },

Because the Calculate Cart policy is explicitly included in the environment JSON file, the Commerce Engine uses the setting in the file to override the default behavior of the Calculate Cart policy, for that specific environment.

Policies for the different Commerce Engine services are defined in the plugins that provide those micro-services. The following table summarizes all of the policies available by micro-service. Click the link in the policies column to go to a more detailed topic on those specific policies.