Building Business Desk Modules

  • Article

This section describes the architecture of Commerce Server Business Desk modules and explains how to build a new Business Desk module.

This section contains:

  • Module Development Basics. Describes Business Desk in general and Business Desk modules in particular. Discusses skill set assumptions that this section makes, and the basic steps required to build a new Business Desk module. Introduces Business Desk terminology and workflow.
  • Business Desk Architecture. Describes the architecture of Business Desk in terms of its constituent parts. These include the Framework, categories, modules, actions, and tasks. Discusses Business Desk security and state management.
  • Business Desk Conventions. Describes the standards and conventions employed in the existing Business Desk modules. Some of these are completely internal, such as coding standards, and some are visible to Business Desk users, such as conventions for error and confirmation messages. The purpose of this section is to make it easier to build new Business Desk modules that conform well to the existing modules.
  • Business Desk Configuration. Describes how Business Desk configuration works in general, and in particular, the configuration information a Business Desk module must provide to execute properly within the Business Desk Framework.
  • Data Manipulation in Business Desk. Discusses the mechanisms typically employed to retrieve data from a database for display in a Business Desk module, and how data that is changed by the user is saved back to the underlying database.
  • HTML Components in Business Desk. Describes the data display and manipulation components that are used extensively in the existing Business Desk modules. One or more of these components are likely to comprise a major portion of the user interface in any new Business Desk module.
  • Business Desk Utilities. Describes the various utility functions that are part of the Business Desk Framework. These functions are employed by the existing Business Desk modules, and will be useful in writing new Business Desk modules.
  • Business Desk Source Code. Provides a roadmap to the source code for the existing Business Desk modules, all of which is included with the product. Often, the easiest way to create a new Business Desk module is to start with the source code for a similar, existing Business Desk module, and modify it as needed.
  • Automating Module Installation. Describes a Component Object Module (COM) object that helps automate the process of integrating new Business Desk modules into existing Business Desk installations. The source code for this object is provided in the Commerce Server Software Development Kit (SDK).

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