Commerce Server Profile Adapter - Useful Information

As most of you already know, commerce server 2007 & 2009 are shipped with a set of Biztalk Adapters that rely on Commerce Server Web Services (the same ones used by the Business User Applications)

to create your own schema for the profile system you can use the ExportProfileXsd.exe tool

but before starting to work on the Profile Adapter there are few things that you should keep in mind:

1. it does not support multiple profile import, it means one profile for each message....
2. it support message types CommerceServerProfilesImport and CommerceServerProfilesUpdate on the port level and you HAVE to use Import to Add a profile and update to UPDATE a profile
   

the first point means, that you will have a bigger number of messages to handle (it could affect the monitoring of your solution - transaction handling and your orchestration complexity)

the second point means that in a typical UPSERT scenario you will have to query the profile system to decide witch message type to use (you can specify it in the context)

these 2 limitations are quite big and it could affect your implementation and the decision to use the Profile Adapter to integrate your profile system in your Architecture....

obviously you could consider to workaround it extending the profile system web service with your own logic to handle the UPSERT scenario, or write your own custom WCF or Biztalk adapter to support your specific requirements or consider using the SQL adapter or consider a different integration pattern (SSIS!?)

as usual there are several approaches when it comes to integrate systems and each one has his own pro and contra....