Introduction to WebShop UserManagement

The UserManagement entity inherits from the standard Websydian User Management pattern. In Websydian WebShop the User Management has been enhanced with a GenericUser concept in order to model the fact that many webshop users are not willing to register as users when products and items are browsed and purchases are made.

GenericUser both covers visitors that have placed orders and thus submitted contact information, and web users that have registered as user in order to preserve their submitted contact information for later purchases.

With this enhancement, the UserManagement entity scopes the following entities:

• GenericUser
• User

The relations of these entities and SessionManagement.Data.Session are depicted below:

Data Model for Session and User Management

A User refer one and only one GenericUser, whereas a User might not exist for a GenericUser. A Session optionally refers to a User, optionally refers to a GenericUser, and optionally refers to a Cart, depending on whether the related instance are created or not.

The order of instance creation is listed below:

• A Session  instance is created when the WebShop application starts.
• A Cart instance is created when the first item is selected.
• A GenericUser instance is created when the first purchase is made or when a user is registered.
• A User instance is created when a user is registered.