Feeds

A Feed is a stream of data – in our case Product data from a channel – presented in a fixed format using e.g. JSON syntax. Feeds are typically used to make it possible for an external service, like an app or a marketplace tool, to fetch up-to-date information at all times.

A feed consists of:

  • A query which selects the subset of your products you want to publish in the feed
  • A context section which allows you to select shop, currency & language values and pass them to the query
  • A format section where you select which data to include in the feed and how to format it

Each of these components are are explained below.

When you create a feed the first thing you have to do is select a query and configure it (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Selecting a query

For all intents and purposes you can select any index query, but you should note that if you plan to use the Context section to set the language, currency & shop context the query should be configured to receive the values passed from the feed. This can be done by creating two parameters:

  • languageId
  • shopId

And, of course, creating the expressions using them (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 This query uses the values passed from the feed to filter products from the feed

The context section (Figure 3.1) is used to set the feed context when retrieving product data and looking up prices and variants.

You can select the following:

Parameter

Use

Notes

Language

Select the ecommerce language(s) to include in this feed

Make sure the index querty has a languageId parameter and an expression using it.

Currency

Select the currency you want the feed to use

 

Shop

Select the shop/warehouse/channel

Make sure the index query has a shopId parameter and an expression using it.

Typically you want to select a channel with a structure that corresponds to the service you’re integrating with.

User

Select a user to pass to the webapi

Typically used to fetch customer-specific prices on solutions using the price matrix.

Time

 Set a specific time to use in price calculations Typically used to fetch future prices

The Format section is used to control two things – which data to include in the feed and how to render it. In practice this is done by selecting a feed provider and configuring it:

Provider

Used for

Comments

Template feed provider

Generating custom feeds using a ViewModel template

To use: 

  1. Select or create a template for generating the feed
  2. Specify a content type
  3. Select the data you want to include in the feed
  4. Save

An URL to the feed will be generated, and can be visited/used externally.
XML feed provider Generating XML feed data - and (optionally) transforming this data using an XSLT stylesheet.

To use:

  1. Select the data you want to include in the feed
  2. Select an XSLT stylesheet which transforms the XML to your desired format
  3. Save

When you save a feed, one or more API URLs to the feed will be generated (Figure 5.1) - click these to review the current feed output in a new tab. Each URL is listed with their selected options, which the feed is based on.

Figure 5.1 Feed API URLs

The API URLs can be extended with custom parameters, provided that the repository query is set up to receive them. Simply add the parameter to the querystring and pass values to it:

http://yoursite.dk/dwapi/Feeds/GetFeedOutput?Id=2&languageId=LANG6¤cyId=DKK&MyParameter=Foo

You can also set up a scheduled task which saves the contents of a feed in a file - see here.