Commerce Foundation Commerce Entity Extensibility Point
All Microsoft Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation commerce entities are presented by an instance of a CommerceEntity class. As defined in Microsoft Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation Objects and Models section, this class contains a PropertyCollection in which are found both commerce entity properties and relationships. You can extend a commerce entity by adding new properties or relationships to existing exposed models, without necessarily creating new classes.
As an example, adding a property to a Commerce Server Core Systems product definition will cause for that property to automatically flow through Microsoft Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation. You are not required to write code for this as they would use the business item’s indexer to access the property value rather than strongly typed properties. You can introduce new commerce entities, for which you will have to create new operation sequences.
3-tier Deployment Considerations
WCF relies on the use of KnownType. These are read at runtime by WCF to provide the proper serialization and WSDL information. If you introduce your own classes into Commerce Server 2009 you will need to provide the KnownType information. This is done in both the presentation and application tier .NET configuration files.
See Also
Other Resources
Commerce Foundation Request and Response Extensibility Point