How To: Catalog Internals

A catalog is a set of products that are to be sold on a list of channels. Each channel has a channel category hierarchy that is used to enrich the products as well as to enable navigation on the channel. The basic process of creating a catalog is: 1. Chose a name and a validity interval 2. Add channels 3. Ad products The validity dates are important when the catalog is validated as described below. The filtering of the products available to be added to the catalog is based on the existence of assortments for that channel. If there are no assorted products for that channel, the list of products is empty. Make sure that you have assorted the products for that channel and the assortment validity interval covers or at least overlaps with the catalog validity dates. There are two ways to add products to the catalog: 1. By using the AddProducts button on the ribbon at top of the window. That button is available only when root of the catalog is selected. In this case the products added to the catalog will be categorized (on each channel) according to the global categorization within the selected channel category hierarchy. 2. By using the button Add within the Products tab. In this case the product categorization is customized; meaning that in addition to global categorization, for the specific channel, the product will also be categorized under the select category hierarchy node. Whole process described above will create a catalog definition. To actually create the listing we need to process the catalog: validate and publish. When validating a catalog the following checks and actions are done: 1. We check if there are any channels added for the catalog. We also check that the channel is in a publish state. 2. We check that there is a lest a product defined in the catalog 3. We check the product assortments for the target channels. If the product assortment for a specific channel is not inclusive of the catalog validity interval the resulting listing will be restricted to the interval assorted. This will also have a performance hit on the performance of validation process. For best results make sure that the products are assorted for the target channels for the validity interval of the catalog. Products not assorted on a specific channel will not be listed on that channel.

4. We check that the required attributes (as defined by the channel schema) have a value. For attributes of type text we check to see if translations are present for the languages defined for the channel. For attributes of a type different than text we cannot check if a value has been set as they will default to the default value for that type. 5. We check to see if there are any non-categorized products. The non-categorized products will not be published on the channels as there is no navigation path to them. The validation process is a longest step in catalog publishing. From our test, the validation of a catalog with 1 million items (fully covered by assortments) takes somewhere around 1h15mins to 1h30 mins. The current catalog implementation requires you to approve a validated catalog. You can modify to not require catalog approval or you can add additional steps to require approval (e.g. recall, expire, etc). The catalog publishing transforms the temporary listings created during validation in fully fledged listings and proper actions are created to be picked up by job A-1075. In order to see the listings in the channel job A-1075 need to be run. Tips: 1. Any changes to the products, categories, attributes outside of catalog editing form will not be seen by the catalog unless the validation step is run again. 2. Changing the channel navigation hierarchy and publishing the channel after validation has the potential to generate failed listings if nodes are removed. 3. Changing the assortment and publishing these changes on the channel in between the validation and catalog publishing steps may generate errors in the channels and has the potential of inconsistent data.