Assisted Service Module

Note: This feature is introduced with version 1.3 of the Spartacus libraries.

The Assisted Service Module (ASM) enables customer service personnel to provide real-time customer sales and service support using the Spartacus storefront. For more information, see Assisted Service Module on the SAP Help Portal.

Table of Contents

Requirements

The Assisted Service Module feature in Spartacus requires SAP Commerce Cloud version 1905.5 or newer. The minimum version of 1905.5 is required to enable CORS in the assistedservicewebservices endpoints.

ASM in Spartacus requires the following SAP Commerce Cloud extensions:

  • assistedservicewebservices extension
  • assistedservicestorefront AddOn

Enabling ASM in Spartacus

To enable ASM in Spartacus, you need to carry out the steps in the following sections:

Granting CMS Permissions

The asagentgroup user group needs specific rights to read CMS data from OCC.

If you start from scratch and initialize your SAP Commerce Cloud system with version 1905.5 or newer, the asagentgroup gets the required permissions to use CMS data through Spartacus and OCC. There is no further action to take.

However, if you upgrade SAP Commerce Cloud from a version that is older than 1905.5, you need to grant the asagentgroup permissions by importing the following ImpEx data through the ImpEx console:

# Access rights for asagentgroup
# - These are needed for rendering (cmsoccaddon).

$START_USERRIGHTS;;;;;;;;;
Type;UID;MemberOfGroups;Password;Target;read;change;create;remove;change_perm
UserGroup;asagentgroup;;;;;;;;

# general
;;;;Item;+;;;;;
;;;;Type;+;;;;;

# access rights for Products, Store, Site and Catalogs
;;;;Product;+;;;;;
;;;;Category;+;;;;;
;;;;VariantType;+;;;;;
;;;;BaseSite;+;;;;;
;;;;BaseStore;+;;;;;
;;;;Catalog;+;;;;;
;;;;CatalogVersion;+;;;;;
;;;;ContentCatalog;+;;;;;
;;;;MediaContainer;+;-;-;-;-;
;;;;MediaContext;+;-;-;-;-;
;;;;MediaFormat;+;-;-;-;-;
;;;;MediaFormatMapping;+;-;-;-;-;

# cms2 items
;;;;CMSItem;+;-;-;-;-;

$END_USERRIGHTS;;;;;

Configuring CORS

The assistedservicewebservices extension requires CORS configuration, which is possible with SAP Commerce Cloud version 1905.5 or newer. The CORS configurations for assistedservicewebservices have default values that are specified in the project.properties file of the assistedservicewebservices. The default values are the following:

corsfilter.assistedservicewebservices.allowedOrigins=http://localhost:4200 https://localhost:4200
corsfilter.assistedservicewebservices.allowedMethods=GET HEAD OPTIONS PATCH PUT POST DELETE
corsfilter.assistedservicewebservices.allowedHeaders=origin content-type accept authorization

Customizing the CORS Configuration

CORS configurations are customized by overriding the default configuration through your local.properties file.

Since configurations are overridden in local.properties, if you want to add a configuration element without losing the default values, you need to add all the defaults in addition to any new elements. For example, to add my-new-header in the allowedHeaders list, in addition to the default headers, you need to add the following to your local.properties file:

corsfilter.assistedservicewebservices.allowedHeaders=origin content-type accept authorization my-new-header.

To customize allowedMethods or allowedHeaders, you should add to the default values.

To customize the allowedOrigins property of assistedservicewebservices, you need to override (that is, replace) the default value in your local.properties file with a host name that is relevant to your environment. The following is an example:

corsfilter.assistedservicewebservices.allowedOrigins=https://my-new-host:4200

For development purposes only, you can set the value to a wildcard (*), as shown in the following example:

corsfilter.assistedservicewebservices.allowedOrigins=*

Note: This wildcard configuration is flexible for development environments, but it is not secure. A more restrictive configuration is required for production use.

Writing ASM-Compatible Code

To write ASM-compatible code, you need to use the takeUserId() function from the UserIdService to determine the userId that is used in OCC calls. This is typically done in a service that dispatches an action that contains the userId in the payload.

Prior to official ASM support in Spartacus, in requests sent on behalf of an authenticated user, the OCC userId was the special “current” OCC user, which was represented by the OCC_USER_ID_CURRENT constant. This can be seen in the following example:

  /**
   * Retrieves user's addresses
   */
  loadAddresses(): void {
    this.store.dispatch(new UserActions.LoadUserAddresses(OCC_USER_ID_CURRENT));
  }

With official ASM support in Spartacus, the correct way to determine the OCC userId is to call UserIdService.takeUserId(). Using the previous example as the starting point, Spartacus now determines the OCC userId as follows:


  /**
   * Retrieves user's addresses
   */
  loadAddresses(): void {
    this.userIdService.takeUserId().subscribe((userId) => {
      this.store.dispatch(new UserActions.LoadUserAddresses(userId));
    });
  }

Note: If OCC_USER_ID_CURRENT is used directly in a service, it should likely be replaced by a call to takeUserId().

To support ASM in Spartacus, and potentially other features in the future, the facade services cannot simply use the “current” special userId when calling various actions. There needs to be some logic that is applied to determine the correct OCC userId to pass down to actions that trigger back end calls. As a result, the logic to determine the correct OCC userId is centralized in the takeUserId() function of the UserIdService.

Configuring the Session Timer Duration

When a customer support agent signs in, a Session Timeout timer appears in the ASM UI. The default value is 600 seconds (10 minutes), but you can change the session timeout duration, as shown in the following example:

provideConfig({
  asm: {
    agentSessionTimer: {
      startingDelayInSeconds: 720,
    },
  },
});

In this example, the duration of the session timer has been set to 720 seconds (12 minutes).

Configuring the Number of Search Results

The number of results in the ASM customer search can be customized, as shown in the following example:

provideConfig({
  asm: {
    customerSearch: {
      maxResults: 20,
    },
  },
});

Invoking the ASM UI in the Storefront

To invoke the ASM UI in the Spartacus storefront, add the ?asm=true suffix to the URL. For example, with the electronics sample store, you can invoke the ASM UI on the home page with the following URL:

https://{hostname}/electronics-spa/en/USD/?asm=true

Extending

No special extensibility is available for this feature.

Limitations

ASM customer emulation does not work with CMS content rules and restrictions in Spartacus. If there are content rules or restrictions that are normally applied based on a customer’s ID, or the customer’s group ID, these rules and restrictions are not applied during an ASM customer emulation. The CMS endpoints instead provide content based on what the customer support agent is permitted to see.

To display CMS content, Spartacus relies on the CMS endpoints from OCC. When requests are sent, the CMS endpoints do not accept a userId parameter that could define the emulated user (that is, the customer). The CMS endpoints only recognize the authenticated user as the sender of requests, and in ASM customer emulation sessions, the authenticated user is the customer support agent.

The following OCC CMS endpoints work only for the authenticated user:

  • /{baseSiteId}/cms/components
  • /{baseSiteId}/cms/components/{componentId}
  • /{baseSiteId}/cms/pages
  • /{baseSiteId}/cms/pages/{pageId}
  • /{baseSiteId}/cms/sitepages

OCC CMS endpoints do not accept a userId parameter, so it is not possible for an emulated customer to trigger CMS rules and restrictions during an ASM emulation session.