Release Information for Versions 1.0-1.5 of Spartacus Libraries

This document describes what is included in all Spartacus 1.x libraries since 1.0.

Note: Spartacus 1.x requires Angular 8. Spartacus is not intended to work with Angular 9.

Last updated February 27, 2020 by Bill Marcotte, Senior Product Manager, Spartacus

Contents:

Introduction

This document describes what is included in the latest releases of Spartacus libraries.

If you have technical questions, you can get in touch with us on Stack Overflow. For non-technical questions, you can reach us on our Slack workspace. Feedback welcome!

Disclaimer - Forward-Looking Statements

This document contains or may contain forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates, and they should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. Any information is subject to change for any reason without notice. The information in this document is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality. This document is provided without a warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. This document is for informational purposes and may not be incorporated into a contract. SAP assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions in this document, except if such damages were caused by SAP’s intentional or gross negligence.

The various documentation links provided point to SAP Commerce Cloud platform or Accelerator documentation or third-party external links. These links are included for information purposes only and may not reflect exactly what is implemented in Spartacus.

Release 1.5

Release 1.5 libraries published February 26, 2020

  • Context Driven Services (CDS)
    CDS provides real-time customer experience personalization for SAP Commerce, now with support for Spartacus! Integration includes the Profile Tag and the Merchandising Carousel features. For more information on the CDS feature itself, see the CDS documentation in the SAP Help Portal.

  • Customer Coupons
    Increase conversion and customer loyalty with Customer Coupons. This feature provides a range of functionality for promotion campaigns, such as allowing customers to claim a coupon using the coupon’s campaign URL, turning on status notifications for a coupon, allowing users to view their coupons in the My Coupons section, and applying usable coupons during checkout.

  • Selective Cart
    Increase conversion and buyer convenience with Selective Cart. Also known as “Save for Later”, Selective Cart allows customers to select which items in the cart they wish to purchase, and to leave other items in the cart for future consideration. This improves the shopping experience and increases the conversion rate.

  • Variants (as seen in the Apparel store)
    Organize and logically display product variants like color and size, making it easier for customers to discover the particular style they want.

  • Applied Promotions
    Promotions now appear in all required locations (in the Added-to-Cart modal for example), not just in the cart. Per-product promotions now also appear in the product entry. This work also includes refactoring to accommodate future support for potential promotions.

  • Skip Links
    The Skip Links features allows users to quickly navigate to important areas of a page using the keyboard. This feature is the first of several Accessibility feature improvements planned for Spartacus.

  • Bug fixes as described in the development release notes

Release 1.4

Release 1.4 libraries published January 27, 2020

What’s new?

Note: The Cancellations and Returns feature is also part of 1.4. However, this feature requires updates to OCC REST APIs that are not yet released. The updated APIs are scheduled to be part of the May 2020 release (Release 2005) of SAP Commerce Cloud. Please see official SAP Commerce Cloud release announcements for more information.

Release 1.3

Release 1.3 libraries published November 18, 2019

What’s new?

Architecture and Development Features

B2B Storefront Features

  • Powertools sample data modified to work with Spartacus (requires latest spartacussampledataaddon).
    Note: B2B Spartacus not yet available (B2B My Company and Checkout planned for Q1 2020). Powertools out-of-the-box sample data itself is now “Spartacus-ified” so that it displays properly when you point Spartacus to it. It’s what we’re using to do our development. However My Company and Checkout not yet supported; you’ll see a few errors related to API calls that we are part of the updated b2boccaddon API release in Q1.

Release 1.2

*Release 1.2 libraries published September 30, 2019

What’s new?

To update to 1.2.0, you must change your libraries in package.json and and dependencies inside app.module.ts. See Building the Spartacus Storefront from Libraries for more information.

  • To use 1.2 features, add these to B2cStorefrontModule.withConfig({ 
      features: {
      level: '1.2',
      consignmentTracking: true,
    },

  • To enable guest or express checkout, add these to B2cStorefrontModule.withConfig({

      checkout: {
    express: true,
    guest: true
  },

  • To use infinite scroll, add these to B2cStorefrontModule.withConfig({

         view: {
      infiniteScroll: {
        active: true,
        productLimit: 500,
        showMoreButton: false,
       },
     },

  • To see ‘early login’ in action, after this line: ConfigModule.withConfigFactory(defaultCmsContentConfig) add ConfigModule.withConfig({routing: { protected: true, } })

  • To enable consignment tracking, add this to features 
    features: {
   consignmentTracking: true
}

Release 1.1

Release 1.1 libraries published August 29, 2019

Release notes: https://github.com/SAP/cloud-commerce-spartacus-storefront/releases

Release 1.0

Release 1.0 libraries published July 4, 2019

Customer-facing storefront features:

Page/Area Notes
Header Displays language and currency selection, shortcut links to help and other sample information pages, logo, search box, cart icon, category bar, and breadcrumbs
Footer Displays company links and copyright notice
Home Driven by CMS page layout and slots
Search Search box in header displays search and product suggestions; search results include facets provided by backend
Categories Category menus in header display up to 2 levels; category results include facets provided by backend
Product details Displays product title, images, price, quantity selection, add to cart, stock, and summary; supplementary information area includes details, specifications, reviews, and shipping information
Added-to-cart modal Displays confirmation that a product was added to the cart; can change quantity in the modal
Authentication Registration, login, and forgot password
Cart page Displays list of items in the cart and purchase summary; allows change of quantity and removal of items
Checkout Typical four-step checkout allowing customer to enter shipping and payment details, choose shipping method, and then review before submitting order; new shipping addresses and payment methods are saved automatically; customers can choose from saved shipping addresses and payment methods; confirmation displayed after successful order submission; can replace entire checkout process or is extendable on a step-by-step basis
Order History Displays list of orders and details for a specific order; orders are listed by consignment
Address Management Displays list of saved shipping addresses; customers can add new shipping addresses, edit and delete shipping addresses, and make set a shipping address as the default
Payment Method Management Displays list of saved payment methods; customers can delete payment methods, and make a payment method the default
Account Settings Displays and allows customers to edit their name, email address, password and consent preferences; also allows the customer to request account closure
Add to Home Allows the customer to add the storefront web app to their device Home or Launch screen, as if the storefront were a native app (search for “PWA Add to Home” for more information)

Architectural and foundational features:

Topic/Area Notes
Decoupled Communicates through API’s only; uses SAP Commerce Cloud APIs ootb but can connect to microservices or other API-based Internet sources
Upgradable libraries Semantic versioning used; recommendation is to use the libraries (don’t fork the source code)
Extendable architecture Replace existing components with custom components; add custom components before or after existing components; customize component-specific business logic; re-use public internal services
Customizable Styling Global variables for ease of branding; precise selectors for fine-tuning styling; also useful for certain simple positioning changes
Responsive Design Layouts display properly on devices of different sizes; ootb viewports include mobile, tablet, desktop, wide desktop; configurable
CMS Driven almost completely by CMS provided by SAP Commerce backend; can be used for marketing content and also as placeholders for injecting functionality; can use third-party systems
SmartEdit SmartEdit supported; same functionality as in Accelerator (requires SAP Commerce 1905)
Routing Allows configuration of all site URLs (e.g. /products/shoes); configurable in Spartacus application but also controlled by CMS routing configuration defined in the backend (thus editable by SmartEdit); includes default configurations so no customization necessary to get Spartacus working
SSR SSR (Server-Side Rendering) supported, where HTML page is rendered on the server instead of on the client; required to for SEO / search site indexing; also improves performance of first time-to-view
SEO Stateful URLs for every part of the storefront; search engine indexing supported by way of SSR; configurable routing; page meta resolvers including title, description, image (og:image), and robots
Cache-first networking Caching of shell app, with more to come in subsequent releases
Localization All front-end texts localizable (texts that are part of the storefront code only; some texts come from backend CMS components, translated in backend)
Cloud Platform Extension Factory Connectivity supported
Builds with CCv2 JavaScript appiclications such as Spartacus-based storefronts can be built alongside SAP Commerce using Commerce Cloud v2

About Spartacus Releases

  • Libraries that are “released” are new, official, tested Spartacus libraries available to the public (hosted on npmjs.com)
  • We usually release new libraries every 2 weeks
  • A change in minor means we added new features, but they are configured to be off by default, so as not to cause compatibility issues. A new minor also means inclusion of changes or bug fixes that may affect compatibility, but these are also controlled by feature flags. So all significant changes are “opt-in”. See feature flag documentation for more information.
  • We will normally publish pre-release libraries labelled ‘next’ a few weeks before a new minor release. The goal is to provide early access to new features and get feedback from the community.
  • If you choose not to use a new feature, you should have no problems upgrading to a new 1.# with features flag set to a previous 1.#. If you do see a problem, please report a bug and we’ll assess and fix it. We encourage you to upgrade to latest libraries frequently during development.
  • To use the new libraries, set your @spartacus libraries in package.json to “~1.#.0” (replace # with the release number). Then run yarn upgrade (although deleting your node_modules and doing yarn install is usually cleaner).
  • To be able to use all functionality in Spartacus 1.*, release 1905 of SAP Commerce Cloud is required. The latest patch release is required or at least strongly recommended, as it usually contains bug fixes that affect Spartacus (for example, ASM requires 1905.5 and Save for Later features requires 1905.11).

How Spartacus is Versioned

Spartacus is following semantic versioning (Major.Minor.Patch).

  • A new patch release (1.2.3 > 1.2.4 for example) means we added fixes or improvements but no new features.
  • A new minor release (1.2.4 > 1.3.0 for example) means we added a new feature and possibly fixes and improvements.

For both patch and minor releases, upgrading to the new libraries should not cause any compatibility problems with your storefront app. (If it does, report a bug.) All new features and fixes are implemented in a compatible way. For example, all new features are disabled by default using feature flags. We hope you will upgrade frequently.

  • A new major release (1.3.2 > 2.0.0 for example) means that, besides adding new features and improvements, we made changes that will likely cause compatibility issues. Your app likely needs updating when moving to a new major release. These effects, reasons, and benefits will be documented.

We don’t plan to introduce a new major release that frequently, unless an issue is found that makes it necessary to move to a major release . The upcoming Angular “Ivy” (after Angular 8) is one factor in our eventual decision to do so.

Future Releases

See the separate roadmap document.