Elastic Path Commerce version 6.2.0 includes bug fixes, performance improvements, and new features.

If you have any questions, contact Support or go to the Grep community site for the latest information and access to support bulletins, forums, and other Elastic Path resources.

What's New in Elastic Path 6.2.0

Price Lists

Prices have been removed from products and are now stored in price lists to provide greater flexibility and improved performance. Price lists can be assigned to shopper segments through selling contexts. Price lists can also be imported from and exported to spreadsheet format (CSV) from within the Commerce Manager client. There are many changes and additions to the Commerce Manager client user interface, including a new price list editor and the removal of the price column from product lists. There are also new pricing APIs for manipulating and assigning price lists.

For more information, see the Commerce Manager Client User Guide and the Pricing section of the Developer Guide.

Product Bundling

Product bundling (also known as kitting) is now supported. Marketers can create both fixed and dynamic bundles. A fixed bundle consists of a fixed set of products. A dynamic bundle is a set of products that can be customized by the purchaser based on rules defined by the marketer (choose any one of product A, B, or C, etc.) There are some changes additions to the Commerce Manager client user interface, including a new dialog to allow bundle price adjustments and some changes to the existing product editor to support bundles. There were also some changes to the existing product APIs to support bundling. A new System Configuration setting was added (COMMERCE/STORE/SEARCH/showBundlesFirst) to control how bundles are displayed in storefront searches.

For more information, see the Commerce Manager Client User Guide and the Product Catalog section of the Developer Guide.

Staging to Production

Elastic Path Commerce now provides highly granular data change management capabilities to help keep your staging and production environments properly synchronized. Commerce Manager client users can add objects to Change Sets in a staging environment to prevent inadvertent or unauthorized modifications. After changes have been made and subsequently approved, system administrators can use the new Data Sync Tool command line application to push the changed data to the production environment.

In addition to the new Data Sync Tool, many changes and additions were made to the Commerce Manager client user interface and new APIs were added to support Change Sets.

For more information, see the following:

• Commerce Manager Client User Guide
• Change Sets section of the Developer Guide
• Data Sync Tool Guide

Object Auditing

Elastic Path Commerce now includes auditing at the business object level. For more information, see the Object Auditing section of the Developer Guide.

Improved Caching

Product caching capabilities have been improved. EhCache caching at the storefront is enabled by default for product data (excluding inventory and pricing information). Level two caching has also been enabled through OpenJPA. For more information, see the Product Caching section of the Deployment Guide.

Gift Certificates

Gift certificates are now handled as products. Themes and denominations are now SKU options. For more information, see the Gift Certificates section of the Commerce Manager Client User Guide.

Shopping Item Personalization

It is now possible to enable shoppers to personalize products they've added to their shopping carts. By creating a configurable product type, the merchant can give their customers the power to personalize products prior to purchasing them. For example, a shopper purchasing a T-shirt may want to personalize it with a custom logo that they've uploaded. Or a shopper purchasing jewellery may want to specify text to be engraved. The new gift certificate is an implementation of a personalizable shopping item. Documentation for this feature will be made available shortly.

Storefront Search Box Auto-completion

The Search box in the storefront can now be configured to show possible matches for the shopper's search terms. The following new settings were added to support this:

• COMMERCE/STORE/AUTOCOMPLETESEARCH/enable
• COMMERCE/STORE/AUTOCOMPLETESEARCH/enablePrice
• COMMERCE/STORE/AUTOCOMPLETESEARCH/enableThumbnail
• COMMERCE/STORE/AUTOCOMPLETESEARCH/numberOfResults
• COMMERCE/STORE/AUTOCOMPLETESEARCH/productDescriptionMaxLength
• COMMERCE/STORE/AUTOCOMPLETESEARCH/productNameMaxLength

For more information, see the System configuration settings reference section of the Deployment Guide.

Import-Export Tool

Several changes were made in the Import-Export Tool in order to support product bundles and price lists, including the following:

• Price lists and base prices can be imported and exported
• If you import an Import-Export package from a previous release and it contains products with prices, the products will be imported without the prices
• Objects can be imported into Change Sets.

For more information, see the Import-Export Tool User Guide.

User Roles and Permissions

As a result of pricing related changes, there were several changes to user role permissions:

• Removed the Catalog Management --> Manage Product Prices permission.
• Added the Manage Product Pricing --> Manage Product Pricing permission.
• Added the Manage Product Pricing --> Manage Price Lists permission.
• Added the Manage Product Pricing --> Import Price Lists permission.
• Added the Manage Product Pricing --> Export Price Lists permission.
• Users that were assigned to a particular catalog and had a User Role that included Catalog Management --> Manage Product Pricing will be automatically assigned all price lists for that catalog.
• User Roles that had Catalog Management --> Manage Product Pricing will automatically get the following permissions:
  • Manage Product Pricing --> Manage Product Pricing
  • Manage Product Pricing --> Manage Price Lists
  • Manage Product Pricing --> Export Price Lists
• User Roles that had Catalog Management --> Run Catalog Import job will automatically get the Manage Product Pricing --> Import Price Lists permission.

Database

There were a large number of changes made to the Elastic Path Commerce database schema:

• Added the following tables to store bundle related data:
  • TBUNDLECONSTITUENTX
  • TBUNDLESELECTIONRULE
• Added the following tables to store price list related data:
  • TBASEAMOUNT
  • TCMUSERPRICELIST
  • TPRICEADJUSTMENT
  • TPRICELIST
  • TPRICELISTASSIGNMENT
• Added TSHOPPINGITEMDATA to support the new Shopping Item Personalization capabilities.
• Add the following tables to support Staging to Production and Auditing capabilities:
  • TCHANGESET
  • TCHANGESETUSER
  • TCHANGEOPERATION
  • TCHANGETRANSACTION
  • TCHANGETRANSACTIONMETADATA
  • TDATACHANGED
  • TOBJECTGROUPMEMBER
  • TOBJECTMETADATA
• Removed all product/SKU/price mapping tables (due to price list changes):
  • TCATALOGPRODUCTPRICE
  • TCATALOGSKUPRICE
  • TCATALOGSUPPORTEDCURRENCY
  • TPRODUCTPRICE
  • TPRODUCTPRICETIER
  • TPRODUCTSKUPRICE
  • TSKUPRICETIER
• Added the TYPE discriminator column to TPRODUCT to distinguish between bundles and standard products.
• Added the NOT_SOLD_SEPARATELY column to TPRODUCT to allow items to only be available in the storefront within the context of a bundle.
• Added the EXCLUDE_FROM_DISCOUNT column to TPRODUCT to allow excluding products such as gift certificates from discounts.

For more information on the database schema, see Database Guide.

Upgrade

Many changes were made throughout the application that could affect your upgrade, especially if you have customized the application. For more information, see the Upgrade Guide.

Documentation

In addition to changes in existing documentation, two new guides have been added:

• Data Sync Tool Guide
• Database Guide