SFRA Student guide - Salesforce B2C Commerce course

In order for you to understand what you can and cannot do with your storefront, let’s review some basic concepts.

• Products: A product is everything that you can sell on your website
• Categories: Organize the structure of products on a storefront.
• Catalogs are flexible and extensible frameworks…

Now that we’ve seen how to do the basics with Business Manager it is time to check our programming environment.

Also, there is an SFCC extension that was developed to Visual Studio code, called Prophet, that does the same job, but instead of having to execute a command in the terminal, it gives us menu options to do the job.

A cartridge is a directory structure that provides a flexible deployment mechanism for customized functionality. It can contain many different types of files including static files (CSS, JavaScript, etc.), image files, etc.

It also contains folders for Commerce Cloud Digital specific files, such as scripts, templates, and form definitions.

Controllers are server-side scripts written in JavaScript and Salesforce B2C Commerce script that handle storefront requests.

They manage the flow of data in your application and create View Models to process each storefront request as a route and generate an appropriate response.

ISML stands for Internet Store Markup Language. These files have the .isml extension and they define how data, tags, and page markup are transformed into HTML that is sent to the browser, using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for page layout and styling.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud Digital uses templates to generate dynamic HTML-based web pages for responses sent back to the client.

We’ve discussed Controllers, Templates and briefly mentioned View Models but without many details, now we will discuss differences between models and view models and why SFRA architecture make use of view models.

It would be nice if you have previous experience in MVC pattern before going deeper, so if it’s not the case, take a look to this link before continue.

All requires we have seen in previous chapters of SFRA course that starts with dw/ means that are part of the Salesforce Commerce Cloud API. we don’t have access to the source code. In case you need details, functions, attributes about any of them, refer to the official documentation.

You can access the API from both controllers and ISML templates for expressions or inside <isscript> tags.

Now that you have a good grasp on the whole architecture and understand how data flows from one place to another, let’s talk about scripts. And no, we are not talking about the SFCC Digital Scripts API this time.

Now we are going to talk about the scripts folder you have inside your cartridge.

The most common way to store and use this content is through content assets, organized into library folders for easier retrieval, and content slots.

In Commerce Cloud, a content asset is a database object with attributes. You can extend the object with its own attributes using the metadata system. The most common usage for content assets is to contain HTML…

Salesforce Commerce Cloud Digital provides tools to simplify form display and processing. Use the Digital Forms framework to control how consumer-entered values are validated by the application, rendered in a browser, and possibly stored on a server.

To use the DigitalForms framework, you need the following files: XML, Controllers, Resources and ISML.

We are going to learn about 2 important SFCC features, which allow us to persist and retrieve data from Business Manager. The first one is called Objects and we have 2 types: System and Custom. The second one is called Site Preferences.

How do you think that Business Manager stores Products, Catalogs or Categories? How does the API work with them?