Things you didn't know about the Customer and Orders Manager UI
Just wanted to highlight a couple of points about the Customer and Orders Manager Business Application that is shipped as part of Commerce Server 2007:
You can run the UI with only some of the web services defined.Simply launch the UI and in the connection dialog box, remove the entry for the web service which is not available or not in use. For e.g. if you are not using the Commerce Server Profile system, you can still use this app to view the Orders by making the Profiles web service URL blank. Note that if the service URL is populated and the UI cannot connect to it, then the UI will not launch. The key is to blank out the URL completely. Here is a screenshot:
You can use the UI to display extended Order system data. If you have an extended LineItem, called say, “ExtLineItem”, then once you have updated the mapping files and web.config etc. on the Orders web service, you should be able to view the extended entities on the UI and search on them (but only the strongly typed properties mapped to explicit tables – you cannot search on weakly-typed properties, irrespective of whether they are mapped or not). The only thing which will not be shown at all are custom classes (i.e. classes not derived from an existing Orders class) since there is no way for the UI to know how to display such entities. Here is a screenshot showing the an extended Order being viewed in the Orders UI:
- You can run the application without a SSL URL in the connection (but you really should try to use SSL if possible since sensitive customer data is involved).
- You can customize the UI completely to display or handle any scenario specific to your business. Simply download the source code and tweak it whichever way you want. For e.g. to display your custom entities mentioned in point #3 above.