WCSADMIN.COM

Urgent Update - June 2008

Admittedly, we rarely hear something like this. The email that I received contained this alarming notice:

A hard coded date is in the product, after which customers are no longer able to add items to their shopping carts. For some store models, this date is 22 June, 2008. All editions and all in-service releases have a hard coded date.

If you see this error in your logs, then you are probably affected by the problem described in this flash alert:

CMN2022E: The command is unable to determine an appropriate fulfillment center for an OrderItem

To know more about the actual problem, error and a fix, check out this link: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?acss=wce062308&rs=3046&uid=swg21308085. The fix for this problem is relatively very simple - one sql update statement on SHPARRANGE table to update the ENDDATE column.

Who is affected?

For the most part, it is possible that many of the currently live web sites may not be impacted at all. If live sites are impacted by this - it will be a serious lapse. If your live site is impacted, please, please write a comment/experience in the comments section below. But then here is the potential list of affected scenarios:

• If you are using certain(?) out of box store models under WCS 6.0 - for all editions and all the fix packs including the latest(6.0.0.4 at the time of this writing).
• If you install commerce 6.0 and publish a store, either in your toolkit or your server environment, you may not be able to add items to the shopping cart. This problem will persist for some foreseeable future.

Previous Flashes

Prior to this one, IBM issued two such commerce specific flash alerts this year(2008). Here is the list:

Recommended fixes and settings for WebSphere Commerce(June 2, 2008)

Potential Dynacache issues after applying Fix Pack 6.0.0.4(March 18, 2008)

Conclusion

It(sic) happens even for IBM.  I got this email from Commerce Support on June 23, 2008. This means this problem was discovered right after the "hard coded" expiration date and not before. They must have been using this hard coded date for some time now. It will be a mystery how they thought of this arbitrary date! It is not known if there is a similar problem with 5.x versions of commerce.