Associating a Vendor with Each Catalog

By associating a vendor ID with each product catalog, the vendor for any given product in an order can be determined by identifying the product catalog associated with the product, and then identifying the vendor associated with that catalog. Being able to determine the vendor associated with each product allows Commerce Server to construct purchase orders on a vendor-by-vendor basis, and deliver those purchase orders to the corresponding vendors by using BizTalk Server.

The process of associating vendors with catalogs is typically done manually, using Commerce Server Business Desk. For more information about assigning a vendor to each catalog, see Setting Up Your Catalogs for BizTalk Server.

Commerce Server also provides a Component Object Model (COM) object designed to allow programmatic assignment of vendors to catalogs. This object also provides methods to, for example, retrieve a list of available vendors, and return vendor information given a particular catalog. For more information about this object, see CatalogToVendorAssociation Object.

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