About BizTalk Server

BizTalk Server 2000 provides a gateway for sending business documents between your company and your trading partners (also known as vendors). For example, if your company uses BizTalk Server, you can trade catalogs, orders, documents, and other electronic forms with your trading partners. BizTalk Server manages the data translation, encryption, digital signatures, and document tracking services for many different transport mechanisms.

You can use BizTalk Server and Commerce Server together to process orders that users place on your Commerce Server Web site. For example, assume you are selling computer hardware on your site. Your company manufactures some of this hardware, and some of it is supplied to you by trading partners. Using BizTalk Server, you can create a trading agreement for each trading partner who supplies the hardware that you sell on your site. When a user visits your site and places an order for one of the products supplied by a trading partner, Commerce Server processes the order and sends it to BizTalk Server, and then BizTalk Server sends the order to the trading partner to be filled.

Catalogs for Multiple Vendors

Vendor ID

Using BizTalk Server to Exchange Catalogs

Sending Orders to BizTalk Server

Processing Received Orders

Catalogs for Multiple Vendors

Before you can use BizTalk Server to transmit orders to your trading partners, you must first organize the catalogs of those trading partners whose products will appear on your site. Each of your trading partners can send you one or more catalogs of their products. Depending on how you set up your site, you can present these catalogs on your Web site as one catalog, or as multiple catalogs. Maintaining multiple catalogs is helpful when, for example, you are targeting several groups of users with different catalog content, such as senior operations management and hobbyists.

Vendors send you their catalogs using e-mail or BizTalk Server, and then you import the catalog to your Commerce Server Catalogs database using the Catalog Editor module in Commerce Server Business Desk. For information about importing catalogs, see Importing a Catalog.

Vendor ID

When you set up an agreement with a vendor, the vendor ID is automatically made available to Commerce Server. The vendor ID is the organization name that you specify for the vendor when you create a destination organization for the source server. For more information, see Creating Source and Destination Organizations on the Source Server.

Commerce Server displays the vendor ID in Business Desk. It displays those trading partners (organizations) that support the same document type as your organization, and thus have compatible document routing. You can then use Business Desk to associate the vendor ID with the catalog.

More than one catalog can be associated with a given vendor. You can also specify a vendor at the product level; however, if you do this you must also customize _additem.asp page (if you are developing with the Retail Solution Site).

If you name a vendor "Default," Commerce Server recognizes your own site as the vendor. For instructions about adding the vendor ID to a catalog, see Setting Up Your Catalogs for BizTalk Server.

Note

• When a user orders an item from your Web site, the item must exist in the catalog of the destination organization. If the destination organization does not have the item in its catalog, BizTalk Server will not be able to process the purchase order on the destination server. It will write an error message to the event log on the destination server.

Using BizTalk Server to Exchange Catalogs

Using BizTalk Server you can exchange catalogs that are used by Commerce Server with your trading partners. After a catalog is converted to an Extensible Markup Language (XML) document, it is processed by BizTalk Server to save the XML catalog file in a shared folder on the destination computer on which Commerce Server is installed. If the destination computer is on a LAN, then BizTalk Server does not need to be installed on the destination computer. If you are sending the catalog using HTTP, then BizTalk Server must be installed on the destination computer.

After an XML catalog file is saved on the destination computer, you use Business Desk to import the catalog from the shared folder on the destination computer and then publish the catalog to the Web site. You can edit the newly imported catalog, if necessary, using the Catalog Editor module in Business Desk to make any changes. For information about importing a catalog using Business Desk, see Importing a Catalog.

You can set up BizTalk Server to automatically incorporate an incoming catalog to Commerce Server.

The following figure shows how an XML catalog file is processed.

Drops the XML document into a shared folder

Your Commerce Server Site

BizTalk Server

Receives XML document

Publish to Web site

Commerce Server database for catalogs

Import an XML catalog file using Business Desk

XML document sent from vendor

Sending Orders to BizTalk Server

The following figure shows how Commerce Server processes an order and then sends it to BizTalk Server.

Commerce Server database for orders

Vendors
Order Form

User places order and checks out

Add vendor name

Business Desk

Web Site

Checkout Pipeline

BizTalk Server sends XML document to vendor

XMLTransforms converts order form to XML document using schema

Splitter creates a collection of vendor IDs and attaches it to order form

Commerce Server database for catalogs

Users perform the following steps to create and process an order:

1. Users add items to their baskets.

   Commerce Server reads the Commerce Server database and retrieves the vendor name for the products.

2. Users proceed to checkout, and the Commerce Server Checkout pipeline processes the order.

   For each line item (product) in the order, the Splitter component indicates whether that product is supplied by your company or by a vendor with whom you have a trading agreement. The Splitter component creates a list of the vendors, and attaches it to the order form.

3. Commerce Server determines whether the BizTalk Options property (in the App Default Config resource) is set to 1.

   If the BizTalk Options property is set to 1, Commerce Server reads the list of vendors and bundles the line items for each vendor.

4. Commerce Server converts the order form into one or more XML documents to be sent to BizTalk Server.

   When Commerce Server converts the order form (using the XMLTransforms process), it creates one XML document for each vendor.

   To convert the order, Commerce Server uses the schema called POSchema.xml, which is associated with the site. If you add one or more fields to the order form, by default Commerce Server does not include the new fields in the XML document that is sent to BizTalk Server. To add the new fields on the order form, you must edit POSchema.xml, an XDR (XML Data-Reduced) format file, and re-associate the XML file with the document in BizTalk Server. You must also transfer the XML file to BizTalk Server and re-associate it. You can edit POSchema.xml using BizTalk Editor.

5. Commerce Server sends the XML documents to BizTalk Server.

Processing Received Orders

You can submit orders to BizTalk Server in several different ways, depending on your needs. You can use mapping to submit orders, you can use a variety of protocols to submit orders, or your trading partner can create a Commerce Server site or a non-Commerce Server site to receive the submitted orders.

If you choose to have your trading partner set up a Commerce Server site to receive orders, you can set up the site using the _recvpo.asp page that receives XML documents from BizTalk Server. When an XML document is received by _recvpo.asp, the XMLTransforms process is started and converts the XML document back to an order form. Commerce Server then runs a pipeline on the order form. After the pipeline processes the order form, the order is saved to the Commerce Server database. By using _recvpo.asp, you can use Commerce Server objects to redirect the XML to your order management system.

The following figure shows how an XML document is sent from your BizTalk Server and processed by the Commerce Server site of the vendor.

Commerce Server Site of Vendor

Order Processing Pipeline

Processes the Order

Transforms XML document into
Order Form

XMLTransforms

_recvpo.asp

BizTalk Server
of Vendor ReceiveStandard.asp

XML document sent from your
BizTalk Server

You can also set up Commerce Server to process and send order forms to a queue, and then set up either your BizTalk Server (or the BizTalk Server at the vendor installation) to poll the queue. If you use this configuration, you can install BizTalk Server and Commerce Server on separate servers. The following figure shows this configuration.

-Dead queue

-Receiver queue

Message
Queuing

-Send queue

Order Form

Polls queue

Commerce
Server

BizTalk
Server

Writes response to Receiver or Dead queues

See Also

Integrating with BizTalk Server

Programmer's Reference

Splitter

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