Interface Reference
You can extend Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 programmatically by building Component Object Model (COM) objects that support specific interfaces. This allows you to call them in a standard fashion. Such objects fall into the following two categories:
Pipeline Components. Pipeline components implement one or more specific interfaces, allowing you to run them in the context of Commerce Server pipelines, and allowing you to configure and include them in pipeline configurations through the Pipeline Editor.
Site Packager Components. Commerce Server Site packager components implement the IPuP interface, allowing them to be invoked by Site Packager so that they can package and unpack custom data. Typically, this is configuration information for custom resources that store their data somewhere other than the Administration database (MSCS_Admin).
The generic persistence interfaces are a third category of standard COM interfaces that Commerce Server COM objects can implement. Pipeline components often implement one or more of these interfaces. Other COM objects supplied with Commerce Server implement some of these persistence interfaces. For example, the Dictionary object implements the IPersistXML interface, allowing the contents of a Dictionary object to be persisted as an XML-formatted string in a specific format. Conversely, the Dictionary object can also be initialized based on the contents of an XML-formatted string in a particular format.
This section provides information about these interfaces so that new COM objects of the relevant types can implement them.