SAP Commerce Cloud 2011: What’s new?

SAP Commerce released version 2011 of Commerce Cloud. As usual, the version number refers to November 2020. How big is this update? Should we rush with the upgrade? What new will the update of the platform bring you? 

Summary

Unfortunately, there is nothing that would make the release significant and important to beat the rush and upgrade. The enhancements are useful and strategic. Still no “next-gen”. No breakthroughs yet. But good, meaningful, consistent moves in terms of architecture and overall integrity.  

• Commerce OCC API Enhancements
  • Configurable bundles APIs
  • Cart Validation OCC API
  • API Endpoint Deactivation
  • OCC AddOn Converter
• Enhancements to Integration APIs, new extensibility features in APIs and Runtime Data Modeling
  • Virtual Attributes
  • Webhooks
  • Enhanced Security
• Backoffice Framework enhancements
  • A set of enhancements, mainly minor

There are also some minor changes related to the Promotion Engine and Accelerator. 

Let’s look at these in detail. 

 

Commerce OCC API enhancements

SAP introduces a set of enhancements in their service-oriented commerce integration layer, Omni-Commerce Connect (OCC). These interfaces are designed to be used mainly from the front end layer, SAP Spartacus or mobile apps.

New features include:

• Configurable Bundles OCC APIs
• Cart Validation OCC API
• API Endpoint Deactivation
• OCC AddOn Converter

 

Configurable Bundles OCC APIs

The Configurable Product Bundling feature is originated from Financial Services Accelerator. It was designed to create complex and personalized product offerings to address the needs of businesses who market and sell such products, as opposed to or in addition to, physical goods and services. 

This feature was originally designed and available only to work with the JSP storefront. The API-fication allows to use it with the decoupled storefronts such as SAP Spartacus. However,

It is worth mentioning that the Spartacus itself is not supporting it yet: the feature “in the roadmap but currently not planned for a specific quarter.”

 

Cart Validation OCC API

With commerce 2011, SAP introduced a new API to validate the cart via a REST call (/{cartId}/validate). Validating the cart before checkout helps to reduce the risk of an unexpected change on the cart or any related items caused by other activities. In the previous versions, the validation errors were returned by the cart/order/checkout service that made it difficult to roll back the changes made by the service before it returned an error. With this feature, it will be possible to display validation errors before proceeding to the checkout page. 

 

API Endpoint Deactivation

The API endpoint deactivation allows you to disable any of the OOTB endpoints by listing their IDs in the configuration.

 

OCC Addon Converter

In 2011, SAP introduces an OCC AddOn Converter which is basically a command-line interface tool that allows you to convert OCC AddOns to OCC Extensions.

 

Integration APIs

In 2011, SAP Commerce Cloud introduces a variety of features that enrich the integration experience for administrators and consumers of the APIs. The new capabilities are:

• Virtual Attributes
• Webhooks
• Enhanced Security

 

Virtual Attributes (Integration Objects)

Virtual attributes can be added and configured (even in runtime) as part of a type and persisted in an Integration Object with a backing script to retrieve the data used to populate them. They aren’t part of the SAP Commerce Type System. 

 

Webhooks (Integration Objects)

Once any change occurs on the root type, an event is fired, and the payload defined by the Integration Object is sent to its destination. The feature supports filtering, retries, logging, and monitoring. 

 

Enhanced Security (Integration Objects)

In 2011, the Integration Objects are not exposed as APIs automatically as it was before. To get them exposed, the administrators have to specify the authentication mode explicitly (BASIC or OAuth2) either in Backoffice or via Meta APIs. Also, Type Access Rights are used by default and allow for the fine-tuning of the access-level permissions for the APIs. Administrators can now restrict access to the create, read, update, and remove options for each type defined in the IntegrationObjectItemType of an Integration Object.

 

Promotion Engine

Container overlap detection

Version 2011 introduces a new feature: Detecting the Overlap of products or categories within containers of a promotion rule. 

The container holds the products selected for a promotion rule. An overlap of the products or categories specified in those containers can lead to performance issues. The detection mechanism performs validations and displays the error if overlapping is found.

 

Search

Grouping Configuration

Grouping allows you to combine products in the search results based on a selected property. For example, you can group the variant products together. Grouping was supported even in the early versions of SAP Commerce, but it was added to Adaptive Search (Backoffice) only in the latest release.

The value indicated in the blue bubble indicates how many items are grouped in that single result for that item:

Voucher Brute Force Attack Detection

Previously the functionality of voucher redemption was left up to the partner to implement according to the specific needs. 

Version 2011 provides a simple brute force detection mechanism which is triggered when a customer attempts to add a voucher to the cart. Its aim is to prevent trying to guess voucher codes. 

In the default (OOTB) implementation, the system tracks attempts on a per IP-address base. If a configurable number of attempts in a configurable window of time have been made, any further attempts of that IP address will be blocked for a configurable amount of time. Specifically, any further attempts from the same IP-address will be denied for one hour if more than 5 attempts have been made within 5 minutes. It allows registering when vouchers are used and enforce usage restrictions if required, as

• limit of available voucher redemptions,
• limit of redemptions per customer

 

Backoffice Enhancements

The SAP Commerce Cloud 2011 release a number of minor enhancements and features to Backoffice Framework:

• Password Change. You can change a password after logging into Backoffice
• Filtering in Dynamic Nodes – The catalog tree implementation is optimized to better support large catalogs
• Filtering Date with Advanced Search
• Setting the Delimiter for CSV Export
• Bulk Editing. When editing multiple items, you can now bulk edit the classification attributes that belong to categories assigned to selected products.
• Classification Features. You can change the order of classification features and create classification features groups. It is also possible to enable the WYSIWYG editor for Category Features.
• Classification Metadata. You can use the metadata endpoint to retrieve information about various data. For example, attribute meta information, attribute position, or a range of values.
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Context-driven Services

Content-Driven Services (CDS) introduced the Recommendations capability, and 2011 supports it via CDS Integration. This feature enables customers to discover relevant products based on the context of their shopping journey, including the product and category they are currently interacting with, as well as their interaction history. It is important to highlight that this component comes as a separate service. 

Deprecated extensions

A set of extensions for Event Tracking is tagged as deprecated. 

New Extensions

• ConfigurableBundleOCC — exposes saved functionality of the Configurable Bundle module in the form of the standardized OCC (Omnichannel Commerce) API. The extension provides REST API endpoints to create, edit, and delete configurable bundles. The ConfigurableBundleOCCTests extension provides automated REST tests for ConfigurableBundleOCC.
• ClassificationGroupServices — handles classification metadata to enable grouping and sorting in classification features,
• SearchBackoffice, SearchProviderCSSearchBackoffice, SearchProviderCSSearchServices, SearchServices to support enhanced search in Backoffice
• WebHookServices — allows SAP Commerce Cloud to send notifications to a configured destination URL when an item is saved (created or updated) – See Integration APIs above