Creating and Accessing Site Terms through Mojave API

on Thursday, January 1, 2009

The purpose of this entry is to demonstrate how to access site terms through Mojave API.

What is a Site Term?

A site term is a set of valid values for information that the user provides. For example, if you added a custom property named "Gender" to the profile named "User," you could define a site term to represent the values "male" and "female," which would provide the valid values for the "Gender" property [1].

How do you Create a Site Term?

There are several ways that you can create the site terms including direct user interaction with the Microsoft Commerce Server Customer and Orders management application. To do this, after opening the Customer And Orders management application,

  • Click on "Site Terms" in the Views pane on the left hand side.
  • Click "Create New Site Term" in the Tasks pane.
  • Fill in the information in the window that pops up to create the new site terms. In the following screenshot we are creating a site term called Security Questions which will be used to hold the security questions that will be presented to the user upon account creation.

  • Click "Save and Close" and you will have created a new site term in Commerce Server 2007.
If you wish, you could also create site terms through code. The purpose of this entry is to show you how you can bubble up existing site terms in your code through Mojave, so we will leave creating site terms through code for another time.

Accessing Site Terms through Mojave API

So now that you have a site term, the next thing you want to do with it is to have access to it in your code. So you can actually reach into the Commerce Server boundary, extract this particular site term and show it in your UI, e.g. extract the security questions from the site terms and display it on your user registration page.

If you are working with the default website that ships with the current Mojave download (CTP4, CTP5), one of the first things you need to do is to add a enumeration entry for your newly created site term. Inside the Common/DateItems folder you will find enums.cs which contains the definition for an enum called SiteTermName. This is simply an enumeration of the site terms that you have available inside Commerce Server. You can add your newly created site term to the bottom of this enum, and make sure that you spell it correctly as you did in the Commerce Server Customers and Orders management application.


SecurityQuestions = 7


The next thing you need to identify is that inside the ProfileController class, there is a method called GetSiteTerm, which takes an SiteTermName enum as a parameter, and returns a CommerceRelationshipList of the specific site term. By inspecting the code closely, you will see that this is done by creating a Commerce Query on the SiteTerm model, and passing in the Site Term Name as the model ID. This returns the entire contents of the site terms as a list.


public static CommerceRelationshipList GetSiteTerm(SiteTermName siteTermName)
{
CommerceRelationshipList siteTerms = new CommerceRelationshipList();
CommerceQueryRelatedItem elementQuery = new CommerceQueryRelatedItem(SiteTerm.RelationshipName.Elements);
elementQuery.Model.Properties.Add(SiteTermElement.PropertyName.Id);
elementQuery.Model.Properties.Add(SiteTermElement.PropertyName.DisplayName);
CommerceQuery query = new CommerceQuery();
query.SearchCriteria.Model.Id = siteTermName.ToString();
query.Model.Properties.Add(SiteTerm.PropertyName.Id);
query.RelatedOperations.Add(elementQuery);
CommerceResponse response = SiteContext.ProcessRequest(query.ToRequest());
CommerceQueryOperationResponse queryResponse = response.OperationResponses[0] as CommerceQueryOperationResponse;
SiteTerm st = queryResponse.CommerceEntities[0];
if (st != null)
{
siteTerms = st.Elements;
}
return siteTerms;
}


So now you have a method that reaches inside the Commerce Server and grabs the Site Term you are interested in. All that remains is a call to this method. You may want to do this from say a helper class or the presenter itself. Here is a function that returns the Security Question site term contents:


public static CommerceRelationshipList GetSecurityQuestions()
{
return ProfileController.GetSiteTerm(SiteTermName.SecurityQuestions);
}


If you like you can convert this CommerceRelationshipList into a keyed collection as you wish.

References:

1. What is a site term?

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