Release Notes
July 2018 – released Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.0 Update 2. This is a product update. Sitecore recommends that you upgrade to this release if it includes new functionality or fixes that meet the needs of your organization.
September 2018 - released Sitecore Commerce Connect Core 11.2.95.zip. This newer version of the Sitecore Commerce Connect Core package adds the Product Synchronization feature. Please see Connect - Product Sync (below).
New features/improvements
| Area | Description | TFS no. |
|---|---|---|
| Business Tools | An Entity Composer feature has been added that allows Business Tools users to add custom attributes to Catalog and other Engine entities. Entities are modified by applying new views. You can create and modify Views and save them as templates. | 29722 |
| Business Tools | The plugin for versioning has been improved to provide versionable entities such as products, thereby allowing business users to have a history of data changes. | 36149 |
| Business Tools | Sitecore's item publishing workflow has been extended to include the Commerce catalog system. The workflow of product updates is now managed from the Business Tools. | 33073 |
| Business Tools | Added two new security roles for Business Tools users: Merchandiser, Relationship Administrator. These roles are described in the Sitecore XC DevOps Guide, User Roles and Permissions section. | 34891 |
| Connect | Added Commerce reports for Experience Analytics. A new reporting package is added to the Commerce Release Package: Sitecore Commerce ExperienceAnalytics Core. | 206042 |
| Connect | Added Commerce reports for Experience Profile. A new reporting package is added to the Commerce Release Package: Sitecore Commerce ExperienceProfile Core. | 162256 |
| Connect | See hotfix instructions under Known issues > Connect > XC Marketing Automation (MA) campaign functionality. Three new Commerce-specific rules for use in marketing automation campaigns have been introduced along with a default Abandoned Cart Campaign, to be used as a starting point for building campaigns for customers who have abandoned their cart to notify them and entice them to return and place an order. Two new Marketing Automation packages are added to the Commerce Release Package: Sitecore Commerce MarketingAutomation Core, and Sitecore Commerce Marketing Automation for AutomationEngine. For more information see the corresponding topic on doc.sitecore.net. |
198729 |
| Connect | Added alignment with the Sitecore Platform's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) tooling. Changes to Connect include the removal of personally identifiable information (PII) from collected interaction data, and the creation of new separate contact facets that can be tagged with a PII sensitive attribute. This allows the Platform GDPR tooling to remove PII data collected by Connect. Caution: this feature applies starting in Commerce 9.0 Update-2; it does not include the migration of any previous release data into compliance. | 209321 |
| Connect | Added support for individual security domains per site. Whenever users and customers are created, deleted and updated, it is done within the provided security domain and configured membership roles. With every API call in Connect, the security domain is now passed along as part of the property bag information. To obtain the security domain from the site context, a domain provider interface has been defined and is being resolved and called to resolve the security domain in use. For more information, see Chapter 1 of the Commerce Connect Developer's Guide on doc.sitecore.net. | 196558 |
| Connect - Product Sync | The original version Sitecore Commerce Connect Core 11.2.83.zip can be extracted from the Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.0 Update-2 Packages for On Premises release package. A newer version Sitecore Commerce Connect Core 11.2.95.zip is also available on its own from the Download Options section. This newer version adds the Product Synchronization feature in the Connect service layer. It is intended specifically for deployments that integrate Sitecore Experience Platform with other commerce systems. There are no other functional or corrective additions in this new version. |
191319 |
| Storefront | Catalogs are now incorporated into the content area of the storefront sites and reside under a new "{tenant}/{site}/{home}/catalogs" item where it's used and belongs.
This fixes multiple issues including: 1. Limited access to the catalog for non-admin Sitecore users. 2. The same products appearing in multiple locations in content with the same item ID and path, causing problems in different places. 3. Not being able to set and store Sitecore specific settings and data like personalization, presentation and workflow on catalog items and have it persisted correctly and uniquely. |
36076, 5755 |
| Storefront | You can now host multiple Storefront sites within the same domain. | 36111, 38231, 38803 |
| Storefront | Presentation information is now stored on Shared Layout instead of Final Layout. | 35664 |
| Storefront | SXA Storefront now includes similar upgrade logic as SXA, where upgrades are automatically detected and scripts are executed to upgrade content if needed. | 36282 |
| Storefront | SXA Storefront now implements the Commerce Connect Domain Provider interface to return the domain of the current currently selected storefront. | 37337 |
| Storefront | SXA Storefront now implements the Commerce Connect Currency Provider interface to return the currency in use of the currently selected storefront. For more information on the Currency Provider interface, see the Commerce Connect Developer Guide. | 32485 |
| Storefront | The Minicart component no longer requests the full shopping cart initially, but only the number of cart lines in the cart. Cart Controller and repository APIs have been extended to support the new method GetCartLinesCount. The actual cart lines content is retrieved when customer hovers over the mini-cart. | 37884 |
| Storefront | Tier-1 languages German, Japanese and Danish can now be select as optional modules during storefront scaffolding when the Storefront template has been selected. Language content can also be selected post storefront creation. | |
| Storefront | SXA Storefront upgraded to SXA 1.7.1. | 37733 |
| Storefront | SXA Storefront upgraded to use and support Knockout version 3.4.2. | 37884 |
| Performance | Storefront mobile responsiveness has been improved. Multiple fixes and improvements have been implemented to improve the experience on mobile devices using responsive design. | n/a |
| Performance | System performance has been improved and the ability to scale out cost effectively. The improvements focus on optimizing calls to and within the Commerce Engine and its databases. Caching has also been optimized. | 37752, 37754, 37763, 37809, 38124 |
| Deployment | We have added a command line tool to the dev.sitecore.net release download page that you can use to migrate Catalog and Inventory data from the legacy Commerce 8.2.x Commerce Server system. | 31735, 31736 |
Resolved issues
| Area | Description | TFS no. |
|---|---|---|
| Commerce | Require a code sample of how to retrieve\add related products for the certain product. A Postman code sample was added. | 37389 |
| Commerce | Spelling issue in the SIF.Sitecore.Commerce.1.1.4\Configuration\Commerce\Master_SingleServer.json | 37771 |
| Commerce | The "indexableStartingPoint Sitecore.ContentSearch.SitecoreIndexableItem is not an instance of ..." error message occurs in the Experience Editor if the "WebEdit.ShowNumberOfLockedItemsOnButton" setting is set to "true" | 38180 |
| Commerce | AddCartLine method of CartProcessor processor has incorrect order of parameters which are passed into GetContainer method | 38221 |
| Commerce | Identity Server authentication fails after hashATypelgorithm is changed in Sitecore web.config | 38678 |
| Commerce | Commerce Engine should disable Windows Performance Counters on Azure Web App | 38868 |
| Commerce Engine Connect | There is no null checking for command.Models in the Sitecore.Commerce.Engine.Connect.Pipelines.Customers.CreateUser class | 36839 |
| Commerce Engine Connect | Creating CommerceUser is hardcoded in Sitecore.Commerce.Engine.Connect.Pipelines.Customers.CreateUser | 36844 |
| Commerce Engine Connect | Sitecore.Commerce.Engine.Connect.Pipelines.Customers.CreateUser processor overrides the passed in result(user) from the previous processors | 36845 |
| Commerce Engine Connect | CE Connect must make a distinction between UserName and Email. See also this TFS no. in the Breaking Changes section below. | 37539 |
| Commerce Engine Connect | Commerce Engine Connect log exceptions without stacktraces | 38737 |
| Commerce Engine Connect | Incorrect "Description" of the "PackageFullPath" parameter in the "CEConnect.json" file | 39014 |
| Engine | CustomerReported: async calls in SitecoreConnectionManager using .Result and blocking Threads | 38558 |
| Engine | VariantId value and parent product's ProductId shouldn't be equal | 38736 |
| Engine | GetCart postman sample misses Components collection | 39079 |
| Storefront | Analytics data is now collected through Commerce Connect when a category or PDP page is visited and when the Search is Initiated. Three new "invisible" components are now available that triggers the calls to Connect and they are inserted on the respective pages on the Storefront template. | 30147 |
| Storefront | Proceed to billing page getting fulfillment error when selected shipping option display text is not identical with shipping option item name. | 37130 |
| Storefront | For extensibility reasons, it's now possible to override virtual methods on CommerceStorefront class. | 38499 |
| Storefront | Numerous issues have been fixed in responsive design mode to support mobile devices and tablets in various screen sizes. | 33824, 33825, 33832 |
| Storefront | Using Creative Exchange to export the Branded or either Mockup themes that comes with the SXA Storefront now includes pages showing mock data. | 33055 |
| Storefront | Use of virtual directories as part of the URL to address the site is now fully supported. | 28445 |
| Storefront | Controller calls that do not involve interaction with xDB are now getting a read-only session copy to improve performance and avoid blocking of AJAX calls. Controller methods are tagged with attribute [StorefrontSessionState(System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateBehavior.ReadOnly)]. | 29918, 29919 |
| Storefront | Mismatch in naming between filename in the XC 9.0 Update-1 release package (Sitecore Commerce Experience Accelerator Habitat Catalog |
37470 |
| Storefront | Product not purchasable error upon adding to cart product from a landing page. | |
| Performance | Improve the performance of the checkout process | 38218 |
| Performance | Rebuild master and web Index performance issue | 38853 |
Breaking changes
| Area | Description | TFS no. |
|---|---|---|
| Commerce Engine | The SitecoreServiceConfigurationExtensions class was moved from Plugin.Sample.AdventureWorks to Sitecore.Comerce.Engine. Any modifications to the Calculate Carts pipelines should be performed in this class. | |
| Commerce Engine Connect | An additional Customer property, "domain" was added in Commerce Engine Connect, as required to support the new Storefront multi-site feature. Previously, CE Connect assigned the email as the username. The CE Connect change in this release now distinguishes between UserName and Email. This allows each defined Storefront site to have a different profile system (i.e. different credentials for each site). | 37539 |
| Connect | The Abandoned Cart Marketing Automation Campaign sample required splitting the models into a new separate assembly. Therefore the Commerce Engine Connect and Storefront components needed to be updated to reference a new Connect Marketing Automation package. | 198729 |
| Connect | The GDPR alignment enhancement changed the structure of contact data. Contact data was moved out of the collected interaction data and into a separate new contact facet. Caution: this change applies starting with Commerce 9.0 Update-2 data; it does not include the migration of previous release data stored in xDB. Commerce data in xDB from previous releases will not comply with this feature as a result of this breaking change. | 209321 |
| Storefront | The default Catalog and Start Navigation Category are now configured from under "{site}/settings/commerce/catalog configuration". This is in order to avoid references from the Global Control Panel settings to specific sites after the catalog content has been moved under the specific sites where it belongs. The old location under Commerce Control Panel is still supported to provide backward compatibility. | 38808 |
Known issues
| Area | Description | TFS no. |
|---|---|---|
| Connect |
Marketing Automation (MA) campaign functionality is disabled by default in the XC 9.0.2 deployment. To enable MA: 1. Deploy the manual steps outlined in the following two MA KB articles: 2. Enable Live Events by setting the field IsLiveEvent to true. 3. Add the xdb.processing.pools to <ma_ops/wwwroot/app_config/ConnectionStrings.config of the marketing automation operations role: <add name="xdb.processing.pools" connectionString="user id=poolsuser;password=ODPYFLX7R2D3Qkzpbw2jdctry6KZPBW2JDCTRY64@;data source=xc902rc4a180705-sql.database.windows.net;Initial Catalog=xc902rc4a180705-pools-db" /> You can copy the entry from the <xc_collect/wwwroot/app_config/ConnectionStrings.config file to make sure you are using the proper database user id. |
198729 |
| Connect | The reports in Experience Profile, showing abandoned cart information is always showing zero abandoned carts because the Abandoned Cart outcome on which these reports are based, is currently not being triggered as part of the Abandoned Cart MA campaign. | |
| Connect | The Commerce-specific Analytics models for events, goals and outcomes are not included in the Analytics index, so they cannot be queried. This is required to ensure the number of fields in the index remains below the Azure index limit of 1,000 fields. | 227486 |
| Connect | Triggering the Product Purchase outcome on Azure introduces exception in "All visits by outcome group" segment processing. This affects commerce reports in Experience Profile showing orders. | 228417 |
| Connect - Product Sync | Exception thrown in Currency Provider code when the Product Synchronization feature is enabled. To reproduce: Enable Sitecore.Commerce.Products.config under /App_Config/Include. Create a Product Repository. Run a full synchronization. Result: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. |
40877 |
| Connect - Product Sync | For a product template the "Manufacturer" field has odd behavior with 3 large controls that overlap in the UI. Multiple "TreeList With Search" controls will overlap controls beneath it so you cannot see the field name. | 250292 |
| Connect - Product Sync | The Resources item (Product Resources template) for a product only provides ability to see the first of several images. To reproduce: Use the filebasedECS sample to synchronize products. Select a product resources item and that has two images as child items. Select the main image. Result: Can only see one image, cannot see both images as options. |
250293 |
| Connect - Product Sync | Field labels are not localized in the predefined templates. | 250388 |
| Connect - Product Sync | Subdivisions are not synchronized as part of the Product Synchronization feature. Sub-divisions nested to a division do not get created in the Sitecore tree structure. | 102140 |
| Connect - Product Sync | Product types do not support hierarchies as they should. When product types are synchronized there is no way to specify ProductTypes in a hierarchical manner. | 250926 |
| Commerce | On Azure, the SXA configuration for Azure indexing (\App_Config\Include\Z.Foundation.Overrides\Sitecore.XA.Foundation.Search.Azure.config) has been disabled to allow indexing to work properly in conjunction with Commerce. SXA Search components are not used in the SXA Storefront, but plain SXA sites without commerce will be affected if deployed in the same instance: - The sxacontent computed field is missing – SXA search will not work at all as it’s using this field to find results. - Geo-search will not work – no ordering by distance or searching within radius. - Dynamic search results boosting (boosting rules in the search scope) – some rules will not work as they require computed fields which are defined in this config (on the other hand, there will be nothing to boost as you won’t have search results anyway). - Field readers for tag and treelist will no longer be there – SXA tags will not work. |
|
| Commerce | New Sitecore XP 9.0 Update-2 feature "Solr Cloud support" is not supported in Commerce deployments. | 38272 |
| Commerce | New Sitecore XP 9.0 Update-2 feature "Mongo-DB (v3.6.4) support" has not been tested in end-to-end Commerce deployments. | 37751 |
| Commerce | Unable to register accounts on newly created SXA Storefront sites. When a new Storefront is provisioned/created using SXA scaffolding, a corresponding new security domain is created in Sitecore. By default, the Commerce Engine is configured to only allow a few known domains:"Storefront" for the optional default Storefront site, "Extranet" and "CommerceUsers" for backward compatibility. Solution: Edit the JSON configuration file for the environment in use and set the value of the Domain property for the policy Sitecore.Commerce.Plugin.Customers.CustomerPropertiesPolicy to include newly created domain names, which by default matches the names of the Storefronts. For more information, see the Sitecore XC DevOps guide. |
39088 |
| Commerce | The Product Catalog item and the content of the catalog configured does not appear in web database. | |
| Storefront | In Firefox, when you open a site exported using SXA Creative Exchange, the font icons are not displayed because Firefox prevents the font files from loading due to the File Same Origin policy. For more information about this policy, see the Firefox documentation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Misc_top_level/Same-origin_policy_for_file:_URIs A work around is to disable the security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy browser configuration file. |
38204 |
| Storefront | Unable to register accounts on SXA Storefront sites on Azure and distributed environments in general. When a new Storefront is provisioned/created using SXA scaffolding, a corresponding new security domain is created on the CM instance. Security domains are stored in the domains.config file stored under "/App_Config/security". Solution: The domains.config file, containing the definition of security domains, needs to be updated manually on cd and (CM) instances in distributed environments like Azure. Copy the file from the CM instance where the storefront(s) where created to the CD instance(s). On Azure, this can be done using the App Service Editor. Alternatively, the domains.config file can be edited on the CD server role, using the same Azure tool. For more information, see the Sitecore XC 9.0 Update-2 Installation Guide (Cloud). |
n/a |
| Storefront | Breadcrumbs are not showing the right path for Category and Product Detail pages. The standard SXA breadcrumb component is configured on the header specific partial designs. By default, the breadcrumb does not work with the Commerce catalog and with the use of wildcard items for navigation and presenting the Catalog content. | |
| Storefront | Broken links appear in the Broken Links application after a deployment of the SXA Storefront | 39597 |
| Storefront | In tablet mode, e.g. mobile responsiveness, the Category bar does not display all categories of the Habitat catalog. The Habitat catalog has many first level categories with long names, which do not fit on the navigation bar when it is compressed. Solution: for custom catalogs, design the category structure to have fewer first level categories and keep the names short, to avoid the problem on tablets. On smaller devices, the menu will turn into a clickable drop-down menu, for example a hamburger-style menu. |
39632 |
| Storefront | Errors are observed in SPE logs while installing SXA Storefront languages during deployment. | 39507 |
| Storefront | On the Product Detail Page for a product variant, discount text is shown when not expected. The same list price is duplicated with a strikethrough when there is no discount configured. | 38850 |
| Storefront | On Azure, the Japanese language is corrupted in the Content Editor when Japanese language has been chosen as the client language. | |
| Storefront | Storefront upgrade script shows blue screen after upgrading, and the user is not informed on what to do. | 39767 |
| Storefront | Product cards on Product List component are not aligned. This happens on the last row when the remaining items does not take up the full width of the row. | 39310 |
| Storefront | Unable to see Catagory page in Experience Editor mode when we click on any Category navigation item in an Azure environment. The workaround is to launch Experience Editor directly on the Category page item and it will show up with mock data. | 39768 |
| Storefront | It is not possible to create a Storefront using VDIR with a hostname which is the same as another Storefront, because it will be hidden. | 39793 |
| Deployment | XC 8.2 to 9.0.x data migration features introduced in this release exclude the migration of Commerce interaction data stored in xDB. | 162286 |