How do I get notified of platform events in SFCC?

Question

What is the typical way of handling events such as new customer registered, cart updated, order posted from a cartridge in SFCC B2C?

Here I can see that some resources 'support server-side customization' by proving hooks, but the number of resources support customization is small and there are no hooks for 'customer registered' or 'cart updated' events there.

Answer 1

Vitaly, I assume you are speaking specifically about the OCAPI interface and not the traditional Demandware Script storefront interface. However, I will answer for both contexts. There is not a single interface that would grant you the ability to know when an event occurs. Furthermore, there are multiple interfaces that can trigger such events:

Open Commerce API (OCAPI)

If you wish to listen to and/or notify an external service of an event that is triggered using this interface, you must use the appropriate hook for the resource for which you want to track the creation or modification. This hook is written in Demandware Script (ECMAScript 5 + custom extensions)

Storefront Interface

Within the storefront interface lies an MVC architecture which is the most prevalent use case for Commerce Cloud B2C. There are a few versions of this MVC architecture but all of them sport several Controllers that handle various user interactions on the server-side. To track all the various mutations and creations of data objects you would need to add code to each of those Controllers. Perhaps more appropriately to the Models that Controllers use to create and mutate those data objects.

Imports

There are two ways to import data into the platform:

• XML File Import
• OCAPI Data API

Both of these import data with no way to trigger a custom behavior based on the result of their actions. You will be effectively blind to when the data was created or modified in many cases.

An approach to remediating this could be a job that looks for objects missing a custom attribute--that this job or customizations to both of the other interfaces set--and adds the custom attribute and/or updates another attribute with a timestamp. In addition to that activity, this job may need to loop over all objects to determine if an import activity changed anything since it last set the aforementioned custom attributes. This could be achieved with yet another custom attribute containing some sort of hash or checksum. This job will need to be running constantly and probably split into two parts that run at different intervals. It is not a performant nor scalable solution.

Instead, and ideally, all systems sending data through these import mechanisms would pre-set the custom attributes so that those fields are updated upon import.

Getting Data Out

In Salesforce Commerce Cloud you can export data either via synchronous external API calls within the storefront request & response context or via asynchronous batch jobs that run in the background. These jobs can write files, transfer them via SFTP, HTTPS, or make external API calls. There is also the OCAPI Data API which could allow you to know when something is added/modified based on polling the API for new data.

In many cases, you are limited by quotas that are in place to help maintain the overall performance of the system.

Approaches

There's a couple of different approaches that you can use to capture and transmit the data necessary to represent these sorts of events. They are summarized below.

An Export Queue

Probably the most performant option is an export queue. Rather than immediately notifying an external system of an event occurring, you can queue up a list of events that have happened and then transmit them to the third party system in a job that runs in the background. The queue is typically constructed using the system's Custom Object concept. As an event occurs you create a new Custom Object which would contain all the necessary information about the event and how to handle that event in the queue. You craft a job component that is added to a job flow that runs periodically. Every 15 minutes for example. This job component would iterate over the queue and perform whatever actions are necessary to transmit that event to the third party system. Once transmitted, the item is removed from the queue.

Just in Time Transmission

You must be careful with this approach as it has the greatest potential to degrade the performance of a merchant's storefront and/or OCAPI interface. As the event occurs, you perform a web service call to the third-party system that collects the event notifications. You must set a pretty aggressive timeout on this request to avoid impacting storefront or API performance too much if the third-party system should become unavailable. I would even recommend combining this approach with the Queue approach described above so that you can add failed API calls to the queue for resending later.

OCAPI Polling

In order to know when something is actually modified or created, you need to implement a custom attribute to track such timestamps. Unfortunately, while there is creationDate and lastModified DateTime stamps on almost every object, they're often not accessible from neither OCAPI nor DW Script APIs. Your custom attributes would require modification to both the OCAPI Hooks and the Storefront Controllers/Models to set those attributes appropriately. Once set, you can query for objects based on those custom attributes using the OCAPI Data API. A third-party system would connect periodically to query for new data objects since it last checked. Note that not all data objects are accessible via the OCAPI Data API and you may be limited on how you can query certain objects so this is by no means a silver bullet approach.

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I wish you the best of luck, and should you need any support in making an appropriate solution, there are a number of System Integrator Partners available in the market. You can find them listed on AppExchange. Filter the Consultants by Salesforce B2C Commerce for a tiered list of partners.

Full disclosure: I work for one such partner: Astound Commerce