Important Security Consideration
It's highly recommended that you protect the \wwstore\admin directory with NT user security to disallow access to the administration page. This alone won't protect access to the various functions, but it'll keep people from finding the links in the first place. Next make sure you set up Basic Authentication (Setup did this for you) and protect access to specific users with the AdminUser key in WebStore.ini. It's also a good idea to access the Admin page via SSL/HTTPS especially when accessing the Order display and XML pages as these potentially contain credit card information.
Invoice Management
You can review orders that were placed online by clicking on the Show Invoices Link.
You can see the basic invoice information including the total of the order and whether the order has been downloaded with the offline viewer (or via XML). More on that in a second. You can click on the downloaded link to switch the flag.
In addition you can drill down into the invoice:
Note that this form doesn't provide all the information the user left. In particular the Credit Card information is left incomplete. To get this information you can look at the XML or download the XML into an application.
To retrieve an order via XML you can use a URL like the following:
MaintShowInvoices.wws?Action=Show&PK=849573&display=XML
or use InvNo=03D0589RA25 instead of the PK key. Note that if you download XML in this fashion, security is applied on the server. The Adminuser setting in the WebStore.ini file determines who has access to that data via Basic Authentication, so make sure you specify the appropriate passwords.
You can also purge old invoices online. You can specify a date before which invoices will be deleted. Note deleting the invoices will delete the invoice and its lineitems only. Any customer information remains - if you want to delete that you have to create your own routines, but remember that the customer file contains user profile information. You'll want to hold on to that as much as you can!
Handling Inventory Online
The online application includes an online Inventory viewer/editor which is fairly basic, but provides you full access to all of the fields in the inventory table. I personally prefer using the offline application to edit and update my inventory items and then upload them through the viewer to the Web site, but if you don't use the viewer the online mechanism provides that same functionality in a little less visual environment.
The main page displays the list of all inventory items. you can then click to display, edit, delete or add a new item.
Note that if you add a new record here, you're responsible for picking a unique PK for the item, since this editor behaves more like a free form Browse window.
Banner Administration
The Web store runs a set of banners for advertising products available in the store as you're cruising through the application. The banners can be administered from a central page:
Data File Maintanence
Operating the Web store generates quite a bit of temporary data. For example, an online order contains temp items that are thrown away when the order is placed. The Web Connection Session table running in your application keeps track of every visitor to the site. Data accumulates and it's a good idea to clear out that data on a regular basis. You can do so with the Reindex tables link which updates all the business object tables as well as the wwSession table.
Reindexing and Packing requires EXCLUSIVE access to the data. So make sure you set your server into Single Server operation before you run these operations remotely - you'll get a note telling you that EXCLUSIVE access could not be achieved.
When you update the Web Store application by adding fields to any of the tables you may have to update those tables online as well. The Update Table Structures link allows you to update the structure of your table to the latest structures that are stored in each business object's CreateTable() method. If CreateTable() is properly set up new fields will be created and data imported automatically.
Show and Manage DLL Settings
This link is the same as Web Connection's DLL management link that provides you the ability to monitor Web Connection Application COM Servers remotely and load and unload them easily.
You might want to add additional links from the Web Connection Adminstration page to this
