Anyone who has had the pleasure of customizing the Commerce Manager knows that it is a complicated piece of software with a lot of moving parts. 

However, with the release of 6.2.1 combined with the new binary-based architecture and a number of clients going through an upgrade process, it has become even more complex with the introduction of patch fragments and a new approach to customizations.

For this blog post, I wanted to demonstrate a handy Eclipse plug-in that lets you visualize the dependencies between the various plug-ins within the Commerce Manager.  This is really useful for quickly discovering which plug-ins/bundles are dependent on each other.

The plug-in is called "Plug-In Dependency Graph Plugin". You can download it from http://testdrivenguy.blogspot.com/2009/05/eclipse-plug-in-dependency-graph.html. Then just unpack it into your Eclipse plugins folder and restart Eclipse.

Open the "Graph Plug-in Dependencies" view, click the search icon in the top right corner, and type in the name of the plugin you want to check out. In this example, I am interested in the our customized admin.configuration plugin.

You can see that there are a lot of dependencies between all the plugins, but by highlighting the admin.configuration plugin I can quickly see which plugins are directly referenced by it.

Alternatively, if you want to see who is directly referencing your plugin, you can show the callers:

In this case, not too interesting.  Let's take a look at com.elasticpath.cmclient.core:

A little more interesting. This plugin can help you quickly track down configuration issues in your plug-in manifest files when developing using the new patch fragment approach.

In future posts, I will provide more technical details as to our approach in implementing the patch fragment architecture including technical challenges encountered and our solutions to these issues.