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You've been toasted!

Contrary to the popular belief, the Sitecore Commerce Experience Accelerator (CXA) is much more than just a set of the commerce-related SXA elements with a reference storefront. Even if your newly created Sitecore Commerce 9 storefront is not going to be SXA-compatible, it makes sense to re-use parts of the CXA features and foundation, as they conveniently encapsulate complexity of the raw Commerce Connect. Since CXA was initially created with the default storefront experience in mind, it still has quite a few quirks that one would not expect to see in a true production-ready framework.

One of the most notorious "features" is the default toaster image. Even if you are using a completely custom catalog, while extending the Sitecore.Commerce.XA.Feature.Catalog feature, product images default to a toaster image. Moreover, if the Commerce Connect chokes while generating catalog templates, and "forgets" to create the Images attribute (the infamous "first product without image" problem of 9.0.1), you would still get toasters. A quick look at the Sitecore.Commerce.XA.Feature.Catalog.Models.CatalogItemRenderingModel reveals why:

protected virtual void SetImages()
{
if (this.Images != null)
return;
this.Images = new List<MediaItem>();
MultilistField field = (MultilistField) this.CatalogItem.Fields["Images"];
if (field != null)
{
foreach (ID targetId in field.TargetIDs)
this.Images.Add((MediaItem) this.CatalogItem.Database.GetItem(targetId));
}
else
this.Images.Add((MediaItem) this.CatalogItem.Database.GetItem(ID.Parse("{8B33A7DC-8680-46AC-A199-1419AF50C330}")));
}
view raw CatalogItemRenderingModel.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub
Right, it has a hard-coded image item ID. This is true for the latest Sitecore Commerce 9 Update 3 with SXA 1.8 based features. If your storefront uses Sitecore.Commerce.XA.Feature.Catalog don't forget to override the default image, or you'll get toasted!

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