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Browser support

commercetools officially supports the latest two versions of all major browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge), unless otherwise noted.

The following browsers are not supported any longer:

• IE 11 and below

Using a test or staging environment for my Custom Application

During the development cycle of new features for a Custom Application, it can be helpful to showcase or test those new features before publishing them to the production environment. This can be accomplished using deployment previews which allow you to inspect different versions of a Custom Application.

Legacy workaround

To emulate a Custom Application preview, create multiple Custom Applications in the Merchant Center, each with a different entryPointUriPath.

You must configure the Custom Application to support dynamic values for the entryPointUriPath and build different versions of it.

The same Custom Application can be deployed several times and have its configuration file set to use different entryPointUriPath values by taking advantage of environment variables for each deployment.

Let's say there are two deployments of the same application: A and B. We can assign an environment value for the entryPointUriPath property in its configuration.

{
  "entryPointUriPath": "${env:ENTRY_POINT_URI_PATH}"
}

The ENTRY_POINT_URI_PATH environment variable can be provided in different ways.

For example:

• as an inline environment variable when running a script command.

  ENTRY_POINT_URI_PATH=my-application-entry-point mc-scripts start

• using a dotenv file.

  .env-ATerminal

  ENTRY_POINT_URI_PATH=my-application-entry-point

  mc-scripts --env .env-A start

• by defining the environment variables in your CI service.

Using this pattern, different entryPointUriPath values can be defined for different environments:

• A environment: my-application-entry-point
• B environment: my-application-entry-point-test

With this setup, preview versions of the Custom Application can be deployed to the B environment and tested using the application my-application-entry-point-test entry point path.

However, besides using different entryPointUriPath values, the logic of verifying the user permissions in the Custom Application source code must also be adjusted accordingly.

As explained in this section, the permission names of a Custom Application are derived from the entryPointUriPath value. Therefore, when using different entryPointUriPath values, the permission names must also be changed.

We recommend using the helper function entryPointUriPathToPermissionKeys to compute the permission names from the entryPointUriPath.

Find more information on how to apply user permissions in the Permissions documentation.

// Make sure to import the helper functions from the `ssr` entry point.
import { entryPointUriPathToPermissionKeys } from '@commercetools-frontend/application-shell/ssr';
export const entryPointUriPath =
  typeof window === 'undefined'
    ? process.env.ENTRY_POINT_URI_PATH
    : window.app.entryPointUriPath;
export const PERMISSIONS = entryPointUriPathToPermissionKeys(entryPointUriPath);

The page keeps reloading itself

If the Merchant Center page keeps reloading itself when accessing a Custom Application, most likely, there's a misconfiguration of the entryPointUriPath. See Page reloading behavior for more information on debugging and solving this issue.

Session token expiration

In the browser, the session token is stored in a secure cookie named mcAccessToken and is valid for 30 days.

Granular permissions for local development

By default, developing a Custom Application requires you to be a member of the Administrators Team. However, for security reasons, your Organization might not be willing to grant administrator access to developers. In this case, an Organization can grant access using a regular team.

To enable this option, you must complete the following prerequisites in the Merchant Center (which can be done only with administrator rights):

1. Configure the Custom Application in the Merchant Center

2. Assign the Application ID
3. Install the Custom Application
4. Create a team (or utilize an existing one)
5. Obtain the teamId from the Merchant Center URL
6. Invite users to the team
7. Assign relevant permissions to the team

After completing these steps, you will have an applicationId and a teamId. You must provide these values for env.production.applicationId and env.development.teamId, respectively, in the Custom Application configuration file.

This process allows any member of the configured team to log in and perform local development for the Custom Application.

Limitations

Custom Applications have the following limitations:

Project access is not automatically updated for newly created Projects on AWS

When a new Project is created in the Organization, the Project cannot be accessed despite the Project access setting being configured to Install for all projects of this organization for an installed Custom Application.

To grant access, the Project access must be updated manually for the installed Custom Application.