Supported Document Formats

Out of the box, AFS supports remote shopping for cXML. Support for the xCBL version of remote shopping, and thus the Commerce One buyer applications, is not quite as straightforward. This is because xCBL itself does not define a document protocol for remote shopping. Instead, Commerce One has adopted a particular version of protocol defined by SAP called the Open Catalog Interface (OCI 2.0b). This protocol uses HTTP rather than XML to pass the information required to initiate and terminate remote shopping sessions. Support for both types of remote shopping consists of significant additions to the Commerce Server 2000 Retail Solution Site, creating a new solution site known as the AFS Solution Site that is included in AFS.

For product catalog publication and purchase order reception, BizTalk Server is used to transform product catalogs and purchase orders between the native Commerce Server XML formats for these documents and the corresponding documents in the cXML and xCBL formats. There is no corresponding transformation performed for remote shopping, for a couple of different reasons. First, Commerce Server does not handle remote shopping on its own, as it handles product catalogs and purchase orders. Second, the protocol of documents exchanged for remote shopping is more complex, and varies between cXML and xCBL more than the simpler document exchanges involved in product catalogs and purchase orders. Indeed, as mentioned previously, xCBL uses the SAP OCI 2.0b method of remote shopping initiation and termination, which does not even use XML.

In any event, as discussed in more detail in the following remote shopping architecture section, the AFS implementation of remote shopping consists of extensions to the Commerce Server 2000 Retail Solution Site – new pages that implement the cXML and xCBL document exchanges directly.

The documents used by cXML and OCI are different enough to warrant their presentation in separate sub-sections.

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