The Commerce Interchange Pipeline (CIP) is an implementation of the Microsoft® Commerce Server version 3.0 pipeline architecture.
Each pipeline is essentially a framework that executes processes in sequence. The framework consists of stages, where each stage is an abstraction that describes generally the kind of work performed by one or more components associated with a stage. Each stage can be completely tailored to your application.
Each stage consists of one or more pipeline components. A component is a Component Object Model (COM) in-process server that performs some operation on the business object. For example, the CIP Encryption stage may contain the EncryptPCKS component, which is designed to encrypt a business data object.
Each component receives data from a previous component, performs its own process on the Transport Dictionary, and then makes the results available to the next component. You can add, move, and reconfigure the pipeline components in the order suited for your commerce application.
A CIP configuration file is created in the same way that a Commerce Server order processing pipeline (OPP) configuration file is created: using the Win32®-based Pipeline Editor or the ASP-based pipeline editor.