Orders
Learn how to place your first order via API.
What is an order?
An order inside the fulfillmenttools platform is the usual entry point when starting the fulfillment process with our platform. We consume this information from an order object:
customer's location
time the order was placed
line items of the order
article
title of that article
article ID in your system
quantity
However, this is the minimum information the platform needs for order fulfillment, there can be more information. For example an order line item can contain a list of scannble codes which need to be scanned when the item is picked in the facility. Furthermore we recommend configuring the delivery preferences for that order. A detailed overview of the information that can be stored in an order, please see the API reference for orders.
Placing the order
To place an order we need the information mentioned above, we need to make a POST call to the orders endpoint.
You might have noticed, that compared to the listing we have much less information on the articles provided with the call. If there is an active listing for the article ID provided, this will automatically be mapped and therefore we don't need to provide every detail again as we already did when creating the listings.
Calling the mentioned endpoint will result in a 201 CREATED
response containing the order object and some additional information:
As you can see here, there are some properties in the JSON which are new compared to what we sent to the API. Let's have a look at them.
id
: Every order has an ID to identify.
version
: Version of the order as part of our optimistic locking mechanism.
orderLineItem.id
: Each order line item has it's own ID.
status
: Every order has a status. Freshly posted orders always have the status OPEN
.
tags
: Tags are their own entity, which can be helpful when configuring the DOMS ruleset. We'll share more information on that later in the tutorial as this is an empty array anyway.
processId
: A process is an entity containing every entity involved in the whole fulfilling processes. It's ID is stored inside that.
created
: Time the order was created in the platform at.
lastModified
: Time the order was most recent modified.
What to do after successfully placed the first order?
After you successfully tested placing some orders, we highly recommend using a piece of software which receives incoming orders from your shop systems, transforms the information into an OrderForCreation object and posts that into the fulfillmenttools platform. However a fully handwritten software project is imaginable here, we do provide an SDK for TypeScript and have a commercetools certified connector in the commercetools marketplace. Also using LowCode platforms like n8n or an integration platform like Patchworks is a possibility. To assist you with the integration of you marketplace and the further integration, we offer a Client SDKs and a commercetools Connect.
After you successfully added a listing and your first facility, it is time to learn how to place an order which you the pickers in the facility can fulfill.
Placeholders
Restrictions
It is only possible to place an order with a duplicated tenantOrderId if the previous orders are not in the status OPEN, LOCKED, or PROMISED. Otherwise, your order creation request will be denied.
If you want to reuse a tenantOrderId and the previous order is in the status OPEN, LOCKED, or PROMISED, you must cancel the previous order first.
Order Events
ORDER_CREATED
If you have subscribed to ORDER_CREATED
webhook events as described in the Eventing tutorial, your service will be notified when a new order has been created. You can evaluate the information from this event, e.g. to start other business processes.
The OrderCreatedWebHookEvent
has all the details about the order:
Here, esp. the order id
and the processId
are of interest because they can be used for subsequent API calls. As you can see here, the status
is LOCKED
, so, evaluating the status field you can subscribe on the creation of locked orders.
ORDER_UNLOCKED
The is an ORDER_UNLOCKED
event you can subscribed to to receive notifications, when an order is manually unlocked and ready for fulfillment.
The OrderUnlockedWebHookEvent
also contains all the details about the order:
The status
(previously LOCKED
) is now OPEN
.
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