atg.commerce.pricing.PricingEngine is the main interface for interacting with the atg.commerce.pricing package. Extensions of this interface describe objects that calculate a price for a specific class of object. For example, OrderPricingEngine extends PricingEngine and calculates prices for orders passed to it.
All PricingEngine implementations process promotions. The PricingEngine interface itself contains only one method, getPricingModels, which extracts a collection of promotions from an input profile.
The PricingEngine interface itself does not describe any functionality other than the promotion extraction API because of the wide range of information that different PricingEngine implementations might require to calculate a price for their specific class of object. For example, the ItemPricingEngine implementation needs one set of input parameters, while the OrderPricingEngine needs a different set.
The individual extensions of the PricingEngine interface contain the API methods for generating a given type of price. There is a Java object type for each type of price that is generated. For example, atg.commerce.pricing.OrderPricingEngine inherits the promotion extraction API from PricingEngine and defines one new method, priceOrder, to generate a price for an order in a given context.
The pricing context is defined by the method’s input parameters. It varies among PricingEngine extensions, but typically it includes the following:
The input object(s) to be priced.
The input promotions to apply to the prices.
The customer’s profile.
The locale for which the price is being generated.
A hash table of extra parameters, which exists so that new APIs do not have to be created to accommodate additional pricing context information.
Extending the Base Pricing Engine
For all extensions of the PricingEngine, follow the same basic procedure:
Extend the
PricingEngineinterface.Define one or more methods that do the following:
Take an input object(s) to be priced.
Take an input context defined by zero or more parameters (in addition to the object to be priced).
Return the price(s) to be associated with the input object(s).
ATG Commerce Extensions of the PricingEngine
ATG Commerce provides the following four extensions of the main PricingEngine interface:
atg.commerce.pricing.ItemPricingEngine
Provides a price foratg.commerce.order.CommerceItemobjects.atg.commerce.pricing.OrderPricingEngine
Provides a price foratg.commerce.order.Orderobjects.atg.commerce.pricing.ShippingPricingEngine
Provides a price foratg.commerce.order.ShippingGroupobjects.atg.commerce.pricing.TaxPricingEngine
Determines tax foratg.commerce.order.Orderobjects.
These interfaces are described in the next section, Pricing Interfaces.
