Channels¶
In the modern world of e-commerce your website is no longer the only point of sale for your goods.
Channel model represents a single sales channel, which can be one of the following things:
- Webstore
- Mobile application
- Cashier in your physical store
Or pretty much any other channel type you can imagine.
What may differ between channels? Particularly anything from your shop configuration:
- products,
- currencies,
- locales (language),
- countries,
- themes,
- hostnames,
- taxes,
- payment and shipping methods,
- menu.
A Channel has a code, a name and a color.
In order to make the system more convenient for the administrator - there is just one, shared admin panel. Also users are shared among the channels.
Tip
In the dev environment you can easily check what channel you are currently on in the Symfony debug toolbar.
Different menu root¶
By default, Sylius will render the same menu for all channels defined in the store, which will be all the children of the taxon with the code category. You can customize this behaviour by specifying a menu taxon in the “Look & feel” section of desired channel.
With this configuration, this particular channel will expose a menu starting from the children of the chosen taxon (T-Shirt taxon in this example):
Rest of the channels will still render only children of category taxon.
How to get the current channel?
You can get the current channel from the channel context.
$channel = $this->container->get('sylius.context.channel')->getChannel();
Warning
Beware! When using multiple channels, remember to configure hostname for each of them.
If missing, default context would not be able to provide appropriate channel and it will result in an error.
Note
The channel is by default determined basing on the hostname, but you can customize that behaviour.
To do that you have to implement the Sylius\Component\Channel\Context\ChannelContextInterface
and register it as a service under the sylius.context.channel tag. You should also add a priority="64"
since the default ChannelContext has a priority="0" (and by default a priority="0" is assigned).
Note
Moreover if the channel depends mainly on the request you can implement the Sylius\Component\Channel\Context\RequestBased\RequestResolverInterface
with its findChannel(Request $request) method and register it under the sylius.context.channel.request_based.resolver tag.
Shop Billing Data¶
For Invoicing and Credit Memo purposes Channels are supplied with a section named Shop Billing Data, which is editable on the Channel create/update form.
Business Units¶
Sylius Plus is supplied with an enhanced version of Shop Billing Data from open source edition. It is also used for Invoicing and Refunds purposes, but it is a separate entity, that you can create outside of the Channel and then just pick a previously created Business Unit on the Channel form.
