Example Catalog Scenario
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One of the ways in which you may want to use the Commerce Server Catalog adapter is to distribute catalog data that is entered and maintained within the Commerce Server Catalog System to one or more business partners who also offer a subset of your products for sale within their Web applications. The following figure illustrates this type of integration, and the circled numbers in the figure correspond to more detailed explanation that follows.
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A business user is tasked with creating and managing product information using the Commerce Server Catalog Manager. In this case, the business user chooses to create and manage these products in multiple catalogs so that these product subsets can be more easily offered for sale in different business partner Web applications.
You have configured a Catalog receive adapter endpoint within your BizTalk Server to receive a CommerceServerCatalogExport message every hour. This XML message contains updates to all of your Commerce Server catalogs that have occurred during the previous hour.
BizTalk Server processes and routes the message containing the catalog updates to two different BizTalk send adapters that are used to deliver the relevant catalog updates to the two business partners shown. The amount of processing done by BizTalk Server might be very little or might be substantial, depending upon factors such as the message format expected by the business partners and the size of the catalog update message. And in any event, the business processing done in this step will need to divide the catalog update information according to the individual Commerce Server catalog within which it is found and whether that catalog data is intended for the business partner in question. BizTalk orchestrations and data transformation according to schema mapping can be utilized where necessary to perform the requisite processing.
Business partner #1 receives the catalog updates appropriate to it, and can continue to sell on your behalf using the latest catalog information.
Business partner #2 also receives the catalog updates appropriate to it, and can also continue to sell on your behalf using the latest catalog information.