1. Contents
  2. Reference
  3. Channels and tasks
  4. Shopware
  5. Categories Upload

Categories Upload

The task writes your category tree into the Shopware shop, below the category configured on the channel as External Root Category. It is the prerequisite for Products Upload: a product can only go into a category that already exists in the shop.

What gets transferred

For each category the shop gets the name, optionally a description, its place below the parent category, and two of the shop's own switches deciding whether the category is active and visible in the navigation.

The tree is built from the top down. The execution first takes the categories below your Root Category and only queues a category's children once that category has arrived in the shop. If a category fails, its subcategories are left for this execution rather than created in the wrong place.

A category that disappears in TRADElube is deleted in the shop on the next execution. That is the price of the shop not maintaining the structure itself: whoever keeps the tree here keeps all of it.

How the transfer plan is built

The task has exactly one plan with two sections:

Section What sits in it
Common The placement and the shop's two switches: Parent Category Id, plus Active and Visible. The two switches take either the category's Active field or a fixed value
Description The texts: Name as a mandatory assignment, plus Description and Layout

Visible is switched off, Active is not. The shop keeps the two switches apart, TRADElube knows only one. So as long as you change nothing, the upload sets the active flag and leaves visibility in the navigation as the shop has it. If you want the two coupled, point Visible at the same source.

Layout picks one of the shop's layout pages and is therefore a fixed value, not a field: the drop-down shows the shop's layouts, and only those of the product list type. Without a choice, a new category gets the layout the shop provides by itself.

With more than one localization the sources carry their language in square brackets. The field Name then appears twice in the source list, as Name [German] and Name [English], and that is how you pick per assignment which language version goes into the shop.

Special features and limits

A category already present in the shop is adopted. Where there is no channel mapping yet, TRADElube looks in the shop below the same parent category for a category of the same name and writes into that one instead of creating a second. That is how a shop that already holds categories can be connected.

Change the root category on the channel and everything runs again. Root Category and External Root Category are part of this task's configuration. If either changes, the plan counts as changed and the next execution transfers every category anew. That is intended: those two fields decide where the whole tree sits in the shop.

Without an external root category the tree lands in the shop's root. A category without a mapped parent gets the node from External Root Category as its parent, and if that field is empty it gets none at all. On a new Shopware installation, Home is the right node.

Further reading