Developing templates in Relatude e-commerce is very easy, and is more or less the same as developing templates in the CMS.
Introduction
The e-commerce module uses the same template system that underpins the rest of the products running on top of the Relatude Adaptive Framework, WAF. There are no restrictions on design at all. If something is possible to achieve in html/javascript/css, you're able to do the same thing in Relatude.
So developing a template in the e-commerce solution is exactly the same as developing a CMS template, except that you have to support the operations needed on an e-commerce site. For example, a method to add the current product to the shopping cart, or listing the contents of the shopping information are e-commerce specific functionality.
You can use both Webforms and MVC to develop e-commerce templates. There is more functionality out of the box for Webforms from controls that ship with solution than for MVC, but you get access to the exact same API that the controls in Webforms use to develop your MVC solution.
MVC Templates
The Relatude E-commerce module supports MVC, but rather than using the Webform controls, you need to talk directly to the API and data model, and handle all rendering yourself. There are a few methods you need to use to build an MVC e-commerce solution:
Get cart (order node)
In order to create a shoppingcart and related views of the cart, you need to fetch the cart (it's an Order node, but with status set to "Basket"). The easiest way to fetch it is to use the static class WAFShopHelper. It has a method called WAFShopHelper.GetCurrentOrder():
public static Order GetCurrentOrder(HttpRequest request,HttpResponse response)
Add product to cart
There is a Webforms control that can add a product to the cart. In MVC you have to call the API function to do it. There are a few variants of this method:
public static int AddProductToCart(int productId, int quantity, Guid orderGuid, int userId)
This is the most commonly used version of the AddProductToCart method. It returns the node id of the OrderItem node that was created to store what was added to the cart.
public static int AddProductToCart(int productId, int quantity, Guid orderGuid, int userId, List<CartBundleOption> selectedBundleOptions)
Relatude E-commerce supports bundles. Bundles can have a number of bundleoptions. This method can be called if you want to add a product bundle to the cart.
public static void AddVariablePriceProductToCart(int productId, double priceIncVat, Guid orderGuid, int userId)
Relatude also supports what we call variable price products. Variable price products are products with no set price. This can be used for donations for example, of a user defined amount. The product could for example be "Donations for Hurricane Cathrina", and marked as a variable price product.
Get current shop
Sometimes you need to lookup some settings on the shop. Since Relatude supports multiple shops in one installation, you need to fetch the shop in the site you're currently on. The easiest way to do that is the following method:
WAFShopHelper.GetCurrentShop()
Get current currency
Relatude E-commerce supports multiple currencies in one shop. But only one of them can be used at a time for a given user. That means a session has to have currently used currency. WebShopHelper contains a method to return the correct currency:
WAFShopHelper.GetCurrentCurrency();