Products Update

The action brings an article from the ERP system into TRADElube. It is the largest of the nineteen and the one you will spend longest on while setting up: its plan reaches from the master data through texts and images to properties, prices and stock.

For everyone maintaining their range in CAO-Faktura it is the main route. Everything that afterwards goes into the connected shops starts from what arrives here.

What gets transferred

Each call is about exactly one article. TRADElube looks it up through the identifier sent along and the matching channel mapping. Where none is found, TRADElube looks in the client for a product with the same product number and writes into that one. Only where that finds nothing either is a new product created.

Variants can be built from either side. The Parent Product assignment hangs the article currently being transferred below another one. Product Variants takes a list of identifiers the other way round and pulls the named articles below this one. Out of the box the second only applies on creation, so that a later execution does not overwrite a structure changed by hand.

How the transfer plan is built

The plan sits in the channel, in the Transfer Plans section under Products and there in the Update tab. It has six sections, and the last four each carry a tab bar of their own whose content comes from your client.

Section	What sits in it	Tabs
Common	The article's master data: Product Number as a mandatory assignment, plus flagging, manufacturer, units, weight and dimensions	none
Descriptions	Name, the two description fields and the three meta fields	one per language version
Images	Per image Position, Name and Is Cover	three, Image 1 to Image 3
Properties	The single assignment Value	one per property of your client
Prices	Net Price, on a special-offer price group also Valid From and Valid To	one per price group
Stock	The single assignment Stock	one per store

So the four lower sections grow with your client. Create a property, a price group or a store and the plan carries one more tab, unfilled at first.

On most rows of the Common section there is nothing to set: weight and article number mean the same in every ERP system. Three places are worth a look.

Units, tax rate and dimensions

Base unit and pack unit arrive as text and are translated through the Base Units and Pack Units tabs in the channel's Mappings section. Without an entry there the field stays empty.

The tax rate arrives as a number and has to exist already under Settings, button Tax Rates. Where the ERP system delivers a rate that does not exist there, the transfer of that article fails and names the rate in traces. That is deliberate: a silently omitted tax rate would only surface at invoicing.

TRADElube understands length, width and height together with their unit. Where the ERP system holds 10cm, the value arrives in millimetres. mm, cm, dm, m and km are known, and a number without a unit counts as millimetres. An unknown unit makes the transfer fail rather than producing a wrong size.

Images

The three tabs each take a file name, and TRADElube connects the article to the medium already sitting in the client under that name. Where there is none, the tab has no effect. The file itself is brought by Products Image Upload.

What the ERP system sends replaces the article's existing set of images. Where an execution delivers two images and the article had three, the third is no longer on the article afterwards. That is the price of the ERP system maintaining the image assignment: whoever maintains it here maintains all of it.

Is Cover is fixed to yes in the first tab and to no in the other two. So which image a shop shows as the cover is decided by the order in the ERP system.

Properties and prices

Every property of your client gets a tab, whether or not the ERP system delivers anything for it. The single assignment inside, Value, picks which field of the ERP system fills that property. On offer are the named fields and ten general user fields, and the user fields are the route for everything CAO-Faktura has no field of its own for.

Properties of the selection type need no assignment by hand here. They take their value from the ERP system's option field, and the row needed for that in the Properties tab of the Mappings section is created by TRADElube itself on the first execution.

With the prices, every price group gets a tab. A price of zero ends the ladder: whatever would come after is not transferred, and existing steps beyond it are removed from the article by TRADElube. That way a ladder shortened in the ERP system stays shortened here, instead of keeping old steps.

Stock is not simply taken over but calculated: from the reported quantity TRADElube subtracts the open invoices and the open orders. So what goes into the shop is the stock genuinely still sellable. The calculation sits as a script in the assignment and can be changed.

Special features and limits

A store is only filled where the article already keeps stock there. A Stock tab without an existing stock row on the article has no effect, and this action does not create it.

The categories do not go along. Which article belongs in which category is reported separately by the ERP system through Products To Category Update.