Planning for Business Process Pipelines

You use pipelines to define and link together one or more stages of a business process, and then run them in sequence to complete a specific task. Each stage of a pipeline contains one or more pipeline components, which are (Component Object Model (COM) objects that can be configured to work with the unique requirements of a site.

Site developers use this infrastructure to implement two pipeline models: the Order Processing pipeline (OPP) and the Content Selection pipeline (CSP).

The following table lists some of the questions that you need to answer in planning for Business Process Pipelines.

Planning question Recommendation
Do the pipeline components included with Commerce Server meet your requirements? If not, do you want to build your own components or purchase them from a third-party pipeline component developer? Examine the functionality provided by the pipelines included with Commerce Server 2000. Determine whether the processing stages meet your needs. If they do not, either extend the pipelines yourself or purchase pipeline components from a third-party pipeline component developer. For example, you can add third-party pipeline components to perform complex tax or shipping calculations and credit card processing.

See Also

Working with Pipelines

Building Pipeline Components

Extending the Content Selection Framework


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