Levels of Integration for a Custom Resource
There are three different levels of integration at which a custom resource can engage Commerce Server Manager. These levels are distinguished by a trade-off between the development effort and the level of customization. The three levels of integration are as follows, shown in order of least development effort to greatest development effort:
A generic resource, which can be implemented by adding appropriate rows to certain tables in the Administration database.
A generic resource with a custom user interface. The user interface is implemented as a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in extension that extends Commerce Server Manager.
A resource with a custom user interface, which stores its configuration values somewhere other than the Administration database.
When using the first two levels of integration, the configuration values for your resource are stored in the Administration database. Even using the third level, some of your configuration values may be stored in the Administration database. If you store the configuration values for your resource in the Administration database, and your Web pages must access one or more of these values frequently, you should consider caching a copy of these values in memory.
The SiteConfigFreeThreaded and GlobalConfig2FreeThreaded objects should be used to access configuration values stored in the Administration database. You cannot store these objects at the application scope because they use apartment threading. You should copy the frequently accessed values into a Dictionary object, and make the Dictionary object available through the IIS Application object.
This section discusses additional details of these three levels of integration.