When thinking of the typical Web application you invariably get the image of an online storefront to sell products online. While e-Commerce is much more than that, variations of Web stores continue to be amongst the most frequent Web projects that are built.

With the Web Store Sample application we are providing you with a fully functional online shopping cart system with full source code. You can use it as is or customize the code for your specific business environment. Why reinvent the wheel for user tracking and profile management, a flexible shopping cart, built-in support for credit card processing and flexible inventory management? A powerful offline order manager lets you download orders and process them offline as well as update and manage inventory remotely. Even if you don't plan on implementing a online store this application is an excellent example how to build a sophisticated Web Connection application using business objects, HTML templates and building distributed applications that can share data over the Web.

The application provides the following features:

• Based on extensible business objects
  The store is designed separating the business and display logic clearly. The Web Conneciton code only 'drives' the business objects, making for a clean Web interface. The same business objects are used in the offline viewer application. The business object classes support extension for base operations like shipping and tax calculations through behavior classes you can attach to the business objects. Other features can be extended easily through subclassing.

• Supports both Visual FoxPro and SQL Server Tables
  The business object layer provides switched data access to either Visual FoxPro or SQL Server data. The base business object class can handle most data access tasks without any special code to access either data source resulting in only minimal amounts of data server specific code in the actual business logic code.

• Web display through HTML Templates
  The visual display of the application is handled through Web Connection HTML templates (ASP Style tags) in FrontPage created pages. This allows user interface editing without touching the business logic and without requiring code changes.

• Sophisticated User Management
  The store provides user profile management for tracking shoppers through the store and the ability for visitors to reconnect to their profiles either automatically via cookies or via logging on to their profile. The profile, as all files are easily extensible via custom fields or XML based properties.

• Basic Inventory Management
  Inventory items can be set up to track inventory counts. Items can be either physical or virtual for those selling electronically distributable items. Inventory can be managed online or offline using the offline order manager application which can upload inventory of individual items or the entire inventory file.

• Order Processing and Credit Card Support
  Order processing can be accomplished right online using a set of easy to use credit card validation classes (requires merchant setup with an AccessPoint, Verisign PayFlow Pro or ClearCommerce/LinkPoint API affiliated merchant). Or you can process credit cards offline from the order manager application.

• XML capable
  The application is also XML enabled with most requests being able to serve XML data directly to XML enabled clients. You can download orders in XML format, get inventory information via XML and even place orders in XML format providing a B2B interface to your store for resellers and corporate customers alike.

• Fully functional offline order manager application
  An offline order manager application that demonstrates the XML features in a distributed application is also provided. The offline manager can download (and also upload) orders, verify credit cards (requires merchant setup), send email notifications, show shipping status. It also provides remote inventory management with full interaction between the offline application and the Web application.

• Full Source Code
  Since this application ships as a sample it comes with fully documented Visual FoxPro source code written by Rick Strahl. Provided is the source for the Web Connection server application, the business object classes, the HTML templates and sample images and the full offline order manager application. The application is documented with an HTML Help file containing a full class reference and a walkthrough. The full documentation is available for online viewing as well.
  

The application comes as a Web Connection add-on which installs into a Web Connection application directory and is installed by running a customized New Project Wizard that creates a new Visual FoxPro project for you. Once the project is generated you can have the store up and running in its default configuration just like it runs on this Web site. Source code for this customized Wizard is also available which is a useful example how to create custom Web Connection installers.

Don't waste your time re-inventing the wheel - see how it's done the easy way.

Note:
This application ships as a sample application, which means we provide only limited support for this product. The application was basically designed for operation on this Web site and no attempt has been made to make this product fully generic for all online point of sale applications. However, we feel that the key features that most online store applications will need are provided in this package in an elegant implementation that can be easily extended and customized.