Basic notions of Multi-Channel Commerce Server Foundation

·         Entities are units of data structures and are declared in MetadataDefinitions.xml with the CommerceEntity element.

·         Entities have relationships to other Entities. Relationships are declared with the Relationships element.

·         An operation acts on an entity to query, create, update or delete instances. Operations are processed by Foundation’s only service entry point: the ProcessRequest method.

·         An operation may have related operations. Related operations declare sub-operations to be applied to the relationships of the base entity. For example, there can be an update operation on a Basket with a related operation to create a line item.

·         An operation with its related operations may be conceived as a tree of operations to be executed by Foundation.

·         Given the main Entity of an operation, one finds exactly one operation sequence responsible for actually executing the requested operation. Operation sequences are declared in ChannelConfiguration.config. For example, the operation sequence responsible for Basket queries is declared in

·         An operation sequence is made of a sequence of Components. Components are units of execution. Components frequenty work with the Commerce Server Core API.

·         Components work to create the result of an operation sequence. The result of an operation sequence is one or more Entities, each with its relationships to other Entities.

Reference: Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation Introduction, in Commerce Server 2009 R2: 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd442342.aspx