Integrating AspDotNetStorefront and Sitecore

Question

Has anyone ever tried to integrate AspDotNetStorefront and Sitecore? I've been trying for the past couple of days to come up with a way to get the two systems to play nicely together, but it doesn't seem feasible from what I can tell. A couple issues I've run across so far:

• Authentication between the two (AspDotNetStorefront has its own implementation, Sitecore just uses/extends .NET Membership)
• The main DLL for AspDotNetStorefront is what pops up in the stack trace when I get yellow-screened, but that DLL is obfuscated so I can't figure out what the problem is.

The biggest issue is that we need to keep our existing AspDotNetStorefront application as an e-commerce backend and use Sitecore to do everything else. AspDotNetStorefront has a CMS as part of it, but it's really not an acceptable solution for anything but really basic content pages.

Any thoughts on how I might go about this?

EDIT:

I've decided to break this whole thing down into the different problems that I am facing at the moment and solve each one as efficiently as I know how. I'll detail the ones I have here and then update when I run into new ones.

Problem 1: Authentication between the two systems.

This one isn't too bad actually if you're knowledgeable about forms authentication tickets, which I wasn't at the time but am learning quickly enough. As long as the two systems share the same encryption info, it's easy enough to pass information back and forth between them using cookies as stated below in the accepted answer. The other kicker is that I needed to set the CustomerGUID in the AspDotNetStorefront Customer table to be the user ID from the Sitecore user tables (standard ASP.NET membership). So far this approach seems to work pretty well (I'm still in the proof of concept stage at the moment.

Another thing to keep in mind if you ever need to attempt this is that AspDotNetStorefront comes with a web service that you can use to basically do anything you need. Since they use the same encryption keys, I am able to log in on the storefront side using this service more securely than just passing over clear text passwords (I had to write the method myself, I don't believe it comes standard, if I am mistaken please let me know). Although I doubt it's a huge deal since it all happens server side anyways.

Problem 2: Getting at the product data

This one was a little more troublesome. The aforementioned web service has a few issues I've had difficulty working around. However, since the databases are going to be on the same server, I simply decided that since all I really need is the price and ID I would go ahead and set the ProductGUID column of each product in the Storefront database to match the Sitecore item ID of the corresponding item in the Sitecore database. This way I just need a quick query to grab the ProductID and price information which is only used in a few places. Everything else is going to be housed in Sitecore.

If anyone has anything to add feel free, as far as I can tell from Google, no one has actually done this before, so I'm having a lot of trouble finding resources on this particular topic.

UPDATE:

The integration is in fact possible and our site has been up for a week and a half now with very few integration related problems. This isn't something I recommend doing really on a personal level, but it is in fact possible to pull off.

Answer 1

Hi, I know ASPDotNetStorefront and other CMS systems (but not Sitecore). If I was approaching this, I would probably start simple and create a custom URL structure for sitecore 'content' pages that ASPDNSF would direct to Sitecore to handle. [possibly replacing the existing topics system in ASPDNSF]. So, for example: a URL such as www.domain.com/p-1234-aproductpage.aspx would be handled by ASPDNSF whereas www.domain.com/content/123/a-content-page would get sent to Sitecore to render. This is a straightforward web.config edit.

Security sharing across the systems should be possible across the same domain as the cookie information will be available (you should be able to create some code in Sitecore using the ASPDNSFCommon.dll and a cast of HttpContext.Current.User into a AspDotNetStorefrontPrincipal class to detect if a customer is logged in)

Another way to approach the problem would be to write a function that retrieved Sitecore content from the database based on a URL id and then write an ASPDNSF XML template to use the function to retrieve this content based on the URL. For example, you could create a custom URL structure in ASPDNSF such as www.domain.com/sc-1234-sitecore-content-item.aspx which is sent to your custom code; 1234 is used as the sitecore content id and the XML template retrieves the content and renders it on screen.

This second approach has the advantage of using Sitecore for all non-product content management while keeping the live application in ASPDNSF. Also one set of design templates and all your security issues go.