Interface Reference

  • Article

Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 can be extended programmatically by building Component Object Model (COM) objects that support specific interfaces. This allows them to be called in a standard fashion. Such objects fall into the following two categories:

  1. Pipeline Components

    Pipeline components implement one or more specific interfaces, allowing them to be executed in the context of Commerce Server pipelines, and to be configured and included in pipeline configurations through the Pipeline Editor. For more information about pipelines and their various uses within Commerce Server, see Working with Pipelines.

  2. Site Packager Components

    Site packager components implement the IPuP interface, allowing them to be invoked by Commerce Server Site Packager so that they can package and unpack custom data. Typically, this is configuration information for custom resources that store their data somewhere other than the Administration database (MSCS_Admin).

    For general information about the integration of custom resources, see Integrating Custom Resources.

    For more specific information about packaging and unpacking data stored somewhere other than the Administration database, see Packaging Other Data.

The generic persistence interfaces are a third category of standard COM interfaces that can be implemented by Commerce Server COM objects. Pipeline components often implement one or more of these interfaces. Some of these persistence interfaces are implemented by other COM objects supplied with Commerce Server. For example, the Dictionary object implements the IPersistXML interface, allowing the contents of a Dictionary object to be persisted as an XML-formatted string in a specific format, and conversely, to be initialized based on the contents of an XML-formatted string in a particular format.

This section provides the details of these interfaces so that they can be implemented by new COM objects of the relevant types.

This section contains:

  • Pipeline Component Interfaces. Describes the pipeline component interfaces through which a COM component can serve as a Commerce Server pipeline component.

  • Site Packager Interface. Describes the site packager interface through which a COM object can be told to package or unpack custom data.

  • Generic Persistence Interfaces. Describes the generic persistence interfaces through which a COM object can be told to save its data as an XML-formatted string, a Dictionary object, or to a stream.


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