Demandware - Implementing 3rd party FTP Service for XML Drop

Scope

I developed a few Demandware cartridges that export xml via ftp for 3rd party integration. A few things that I have done such as:-

• Piggy back a ftp drop task to the current job schedule that imports xml from a difference integration point
• Using standard Demandware pipelet to generate a xml feed for ftp drop
• Create a custom script node to generate a xml feed for ftp drop

It wasn't too difficult as a job, but I found a few hidden gotchas that I believe are noteworthy.


We are dealing with the latest Demandware version 16.7.

Technical

FTP Constraints

• Ftp connection is established using passive transfer mode (PASV) only.
• Demandware only support ftp and sftp for backend integration, no ftps.
• Use FTPClient for ftp; and SFTPClient for sftp.

ArrayList

In our code, we use dw.util.ArrayList to filter out products for export. We ran into an error where the ArrayList cannot be bigger than 20,000 in size.

Front End Debugging

I was testing out a pipeline-startnode by direct url from a broswer, it did not turn out well because some of the pipelets can only be executed from the backend. The error message looks like this.

com.demandware.core.quota.QuotaExceededException:
Limit for quota 'api.pipelet.ImportExport' exceeded. Limit is 0, actual is 1.

Job Schedule

We tried to schedule a job for our cartridge and learnt in a hard way that JS Controller is not supported for Business Manager Job Schedule. Only pipeplines can be used.

Traversing XML

If you happened in need of traversaing the xml, Demandware uses ECMA scripts for XML. Here is a quick start guide.

Firewall

Besides the firewall rules that I needed to manage with our external vendor, we also need to request outbound firewall rule from Demandware.

As they pointed out in their doc, "Before you can make an outbound FTP connection, the FTP server IP address must be enabled for outbound traffic at the Demandware firewall for your POD. Please file a support request to request a new firewall rule".

From Demandware, there are steps to request a Firewall rule to allow outgoing connections to 3rd party services.