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Levels of Integration

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There are three different levels of integration at which a new 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:

  1. A generic resource, which can be implemented simply by adding appropriate rows to certain tables within the Administration database.

  2. 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.

  3. 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, and 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 need to access one or more of these values frequently, you should consider caching a copy of these values in memory.

The SiteConfig and GlobalConfig 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 accessible through the IIS Application object.

This section discusses further details of these three levels of integration.

This section contains:

  • Using the Generic Properties Dialog Box. Provides additional information about the integration approach that requires the least development effort.

  • Integrating a Custom Snap-in Extension. Provides additional information about an integration approach that offers a customized user interface while preserving some of the ease-of-use advantages of generic resource integration.

  • Packaging Other Data. Provides additional information about the integration approach that allows configuration data to be stored somewhere other than the Administration database, yet still allows the resource to use Commerce Server Site Packager.


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