B2B sites often require the functionality to create orders to be fulfilled repeatedly on a specific schedule, or to construct and save orders to be placed at a later date. You can use ATG Business Commerce to support these B2B requirements through the use of scheduled orders.
In ATG Business Commerce, a scheduled Order object (of type scheduledOrder) maintains the schedule information for the scheduled order, and a template Order object maintains the order information for the scheduled order. The template Order object is a typical Order in the orderRepository, but it has a state of TEMPLATE. When a scheduled order is placed, the template order is cloned, and the cloned order is checked out and sent to Fulfillment. Consequently, the template Order is never processed, but simply serves as a prototype.
Template orders must include enough information, such as all necessary shipping and payment information, to process the cloned Order without further user interaction. A previously processed order or even the user’s shopping cart (once the shipping and payment information has been specified) can be used to create a template order.
This section describes the ATG Business Commerce framework that supports scheduled orders and includes the following subsections:
For an example implementation of scheduled orders, see the Scheduling Orders section of the My Account chapter in the ATG Business Commerce Reference Application Guide.
Important: The current implementation of the scheduled order service is designed to run on only one machine at a time. The service is therefore best adapted for use on sites where the number of scheduled orders that must be completed per day is not greater than the number that can be processed by a single server. It may not be suitable for use on sites that need to process very large numbers of scheduled orders. (The exact number depends on a variety of factors, including machine and database speed as well as the amount of time required by external systems such as tax and shipping calculators.)
Note, however, that even large orders can be handled effectively if you configure multiple servers so that each one processes only a specific subset of scheduled orders. For information on how to achieve this behavior, see Configuring a Scheduled Order Service to Handle Large Orders.
