Insite Plus Sitecore Connector

1. Making the Connection:
InsiteCommerce & Sitecore
Kautilya Prasad & Dan Solovay
XCentium

2. On the menu…
1. What is Sitecore Commerce Connect?
2. What is InsiteCommerce?
3. The InsiteCommerce Plus Sitecore connector in action.
4. A look behind the scenes.
5. Q&A

3. What is Commerce Connect?
• Framework for wiring up commerce
systems to Sitecore
• Imports products to Sitecore
• Provides APIs for shopping funnel
• Goals and Engagement Plans
• Extensible architecture
• Pipelines
• Domain Objects
• Repositories
Commerce Connect
Insite 4.1-4.x
InsiteCommerce Plus Sitecore
Sitecore 8.X

4. What is Insite Commerce ?
• Deep integration capabilities
• Manage products
• Assign pricing
• Maintain inventory
• Order processing
• Out of the box functionality
• Search
• Frontend
• B2C and B2B ecommerce

5. Insite Commerce .. continued
• Exposes rest APIs to interact
with Insite
• Multisite
• Multi currency
• Multi lingual
• Customer based catalogues
• Customer based pricing
• Power platform for B2B

6. Insite Plus Sitecore Connect
What is it?
• Product
• Connects Sitecore and Insite
• Standardization
• Standard Sitecore APIs used for
information flow
• Development
• No knowledge of underlying Insite
APIs required
• Personalization
• Track user history and personalize
• Marketing
• Monitor goals and Engagement Plans
First Time User – Featured
Products Returning Customer –
Personalized Products based
on history

7. Insite Plus Sitecore Connect… continued
• Easy Integration
• Bring Products into Sitecore
• xDB
• Track user activity, goals
• Time to Market
• Effort required for development
• Unique Insite Features
• Customer Based Catalogues
• Pricing
• Sitecore Commerce Connect 8.0
• Extensible and Robust

8. Insite Plus Sitecore Connect… continued
Search capabilities
• Implement Sitecore search
• Insite search
Mix product content

9. How does the Content Tree look like?

10. Demo

11. So, how does this all work?
• Pipelines and Service Providers
• Service Providers wrap pipelines
• Pipelines interact with xDB and Sitecore Content
• We implemented commands for talking to Insite 4.x Rest API
• Entities and Repositories
• Entity classes (product, category, etc.) are pure DTOs with no
dependencies on Commerce System or Sitecore.
• Repository classes provide access, mapping methods.
• We extended both to provide some Insite specific features
(Unit of Measure, Category images)
• Product Sync
• Loads “artifacts” first: images, classes, categories, global
attributes
• Then it updates each product
• Insite Styled Variants as a challenge: attributes are contained
in parent item.

12. Pipelines connect shop to Sitecore
Pipelines exist for all user and shopping funnel events,
with processors for all Sitecore communication.
• Reading or saving commerce entities to Sitecore:
• Recording to xDB (Goals, Events, Engagement Automation):

13. Pipelines connect Sitecore to Insite
Sitecore provides stub methods for communication to External Commerce System…
We override these to query the Insite API…
… and write the results to pipeline argument properties.

14. So how is this content stored in Sitecore?
• Commerce entities are defined as entity classes:
• Repository classes map these to Sitecore items:
• Repositories provide abstraction layer between code and persistence (items, user manger, or xDB)

15. Insite IDs are mapped to Sitecore IDs
• MD5 hashing used to turn Insite IDs to Sitecore IDs:
• Item.ID = MD5.ComputeHash(prefix + Insite ID)
• Prefix is defined in repository parameters (e.g. “Product_”).
• Faster than storing ID conversions, and does not use disk.
• Ensures products consistently map to items

16. Repository configuration ties it all together
• A type to manage the collection.
• The branch template for creating items.
• The location of the repository
• The prefix for ID Generation

17. Repositories & entities are extensible
1. Add new base template
2. Override entity class definition in
configuration
3. Extend repository class in
configuration and extend mapping
methods

18. SynchronizeProducts pipeline loads the repository

19. SynchronizeProducts has four steps
• Synchronize artifacts: Categories, classes, manufacturers,
• Load list of products
• Synchronize each product entity individually
• Synchronize each product attribute or relationship

20. Challenge of Styled Variants
• Attributes are loaded before products, but for Insite Styled Variants, attributes are part of
parent product.
• Solution:
• Call mini artifacts pipeline
• Call mini product pipeline
• Return to main product pipeline

21. To learn more…
• Watch the series on YouTube “Master Sitecore” channel
• Follow Kautilya’s blog posts at XCentium.com