This is definitely an area we want to improve. I had looked at this when version 9 was first developed, but there was an issue with the warehouse to product relationship (specifically, enforcement during fulfillment). I can't remember all the details at the moment, but we would love to get more feedback on everything we need to have a full-featured inventory system.

I'll try to have a developer look at the EventManager to see what it would take to include the order level events.

Thanks!
Katie

We also a have couple of inventory management events:

InventoryDestocked: When a product (or its variant) is purchased and marked SHIPPED from order admin this event is fired.
InventoryRestocked: When a purchased product (or its variant) is RETURNED from order admin this event is fired.
LowInventoryItemPurchased : low inventory item (product/variant) purchased event

I am not sure if these are useful in your scenario?
Another very useful event with respect to order management is OrderStatusUpdated which can be useful in many scenarios. You can write your custom event handlers for these events and perform various tasks.



Please explain in details that what features you are looking for?

The inventory is actually de-stocked when order items are shipped, so the respective InventoryDestocked event fires when order item is shipped from admin.
Also the InventoryRestocked event is fired when order item is returned from order admin.

However LowInventoryItemPurchased event is fired when order is placed with a product line item for which the inventory is low on stock.



No there is no such event which fires when order items are added/removed. OrderStatusUpdated only fires when order status is updated. In some cases when new order items are added the order status may change, but not always.

As I mentioned before, the inventory in AbleCommerce is updated when from order admin you SHIP an item, or RETURN an item. Both actions have events associated with those as well. Also when a Low Inventory item is purchased (order placed), the "LowInventoryItemPurchased" event is fired.

AbleCommerce application do not update inventory when order line item is added or remove to order. I think you should update your code to follow this, and update the inventory when order items are shipped from order admin.

If you have better approach to handle it, then we are open for ideas.

Thanks,
Naveed Ashraf

I don't mean to be rude, but based on your posts in this thread it doesn't seem like you are open to ideas. The idea provided was to have events for when order items are inserted, updated, or deleted. You keep repeating the same answer, and I keep telling you it does not work for our business case. It didn't seem like an unreasonable suggestion since you already have an event manager and are trying to build out your Zapier integration. Not sure if the your concern is performance, or you aren't understanding our business case and why we're requesting it... but the need is definitely there!

We accept backorders. Customers place orders. We handle hundreds of orders each day across multiple stores. Customers can call or email to edit orders at any time before or after shipment. Orders get held up for fraud and address checks. We don't want to promise a customer delivery of an item, then ship it to a more recent order because the first customer has a backorder hold for another item, or we put the first customer's order on hold to check an address.

Our order management/inventory system allows us to handle all of that by reserving inventory when an order is placed. These reservations/allotments need to be updated when an order is modified (edited, shipped, cancelled, or returned). Period. The allotment values need to be correct because the pick/pack functionality checks allotments to make sure not to over-pick or bumping anyone that ordered first but may be on hold.

Your response was to essentially dumb down the functionality of our systems to ignore inventory allotments and use only the stock quantity field during shipping and returns. If that were good enough, we wouldn't need an inventory system, we'd just use AbleCommerce. We did that over a decade ago in our company's early stages and it didn't work for us. AC's inventory management is not robust enough.

There are a few open source shopping carts that provide Insert/Update/Delete event hooks for all business object/entity types. I provided another developer links to the repositories via BaseCamp so he could see how it was done in a generic manner which didn't require coding up custom events for everything.

We really like AbleCommerce. Having the ability to customize source code to meet our business needs has been extremely helpful over the years. But customizing source has also made it so that it is very difficult to apply patches and upgrade. With AC9's revamped plug-in system and Zapier integration, I thought it was worth bringing up suggestions for improving the flexibility.

Since Able already has the logic for allocating/de-allocating stock, why not just roll your own events in default event manager and hook them to the OrderItem class object via overrides of BeforeSave() or AfterSave() in the respective repository? You can identify if it's an add or edit simply by checking the entity Id. A value = 0 means the entity is a new instance while anything > 0 would be an edit.

Yes Able goes through the repo for all DAL behaviors.

As far as inheriting from OrderItemRepository, from what I understand, the answer is yes. Except you wouldn't register your repo as the default. You'd simply register it as another repo using the RegisterFor decorator and call base.BeforeSave() or base.AfterSave() at the end of your code in your own class. From what I understand, all containers registered as IOC containers get called. So (theoretically) you could register 15 IOC containers all inheriting from the OrderItem repo and they would all get called because they're all registered with the decorator. You just can't control the sequence in which each one is called which obviously creates a few (or more) concerns.

Mazhar could probably clarify that for you better than I, I don't go this route when I code heavy customizations.

My projects all have full source, so I just modify existing Able class files using comments to make merges easy with future updates and recompile the CommerceBuilder project. Much faster, much easier that way. Of course when possible, I always put my custom classes in a separate folder, but still always a part of the CommerceBuilder project. Sometimes my code uses an Able namespace, sometimes I use my own.

Often I need to modify existing behavior rather than extend it, so modifying Able source is the most time-effective approach. YMMV.

If you're trying to do all of this via the plug-in system, I'm the wrong guy to help. I have yet to figure out how to make even a simple plugin work with the new plugin system mostly due to my inexperience with MVC.

Here is some sample code that demonstrates that how you can override the OrderItemRepository class to inject your own logic. For example triggering your own custom events:

Nhibernate is responsible for syncing the object graph which means when you save something on a session, nhibernate detects something else modified in object graph then it will flush updates for all modified entities and not just then one where save was called. We intercept the entity events even when they were not initiated by entity itself for consistency, this is why you are seeing your custom handler being invoked when a related entity maybe causing updates to order items.

The transient tells if the object is loaded or its still not saved at all. For example a transient object will not have its ID set in this case OrderId. Since, we want to trigger the event for post order processing we are expecting orders to be already saved in database hence !item.Order.IsTransient(), moreover we don't want to trigger events right after the checkout when updates are made to order automatically as part of checkout. Hence there is a check to see that order is at least out of a 10 second window for a post order processing action where merchant is making updates manually.


Perhaps, the code is trying to keep these events for post order processing.

There is an extension method IsDirtyEntity for nhibernate session object available under CommerceBuilder.Extensions. You can import the namespace and test any entity for dirty check against current session like this.