Tutorial: Extending an SOI service with Overlays

In this tutorial you will extend the OrderItem Web services noun to add new information and functionality to your storefront. You will use overlays to transfer order information from your store to your WebSphere Commerce database. This support provides you the functionality of additional input fields for your customers to enter information during the ordering process which you can customize to meet your business needs.

Note: Extending BOD services with Overlays is not supported. Instead, you must extend an SOI service with Overlays, as shown in this tutorial.

In this tutorial you will be specifically adding input fields for customers to enter information during the ordering process to have products engraved with text your customers enter into the additional input fields. You will be updating product attribute database tables to provide the option to have products engraved during the checkout process. As an example, you will be adding personalization engraving support to wine glass products. This personalization support you will add during this tutorial will provides your customers the option to specify the text, size and font for the engraving they specify to personalize their ordered products.

Learning objectives

After completing this tutorial you should be able to complete the following tasks:
  • Extend nouns using overlays.
  • Use access beans to persist and retrieve data.
  • Add support for personalizing products

Time required

Expect this tutorial to take about 4 hours to complete. This tutorial will take longer if you explore concepts related to this tutorial.

Skill level

This tutorial is intended for advanced WebSphere Commerce developers who are familiar with the following concepts and tasks:
  • Creating business logic for WebSphere Commerce
  • WebSphere Commerce Development Environment
  • Java programming language
  • Inserting and updating database content
  • JSP files
  • EJB beans
  • Access beans
  • XML

System requirements

Before beginning this tutorial, ensure you have completed the following:
Note: If you are using Rational Application Developer to generate Java artifacts, by default the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) 2.4 is chosen. To develop with WebSphere Commerce Version 7, select EMF 2.2 when generating Java artifacts. For more information see Setting an EMF genmodel to generate 2.2 compatible objects