1. Contents
  2. Reference
  3. Channels and tasks
  4. Shopware
  5. Products Download

Products Download

The task fetches the products from the Shopware shop into TRADElube, with descriptions, prices, image references, property values and categories. It is the right way round when the catalogue is maintained in the shop. If you keep it in TRADElube instead, use Products Upload.

What gets transferred

For each product in the shop a product is created in TRADElube, and a parent article and its variants are treated separately: each has a transfer plan of its own.

TRADElube transfers only what has changed. For every product read, TRADElube forms a checksum over the shop's whole record and compares it against the last transfer. For a variant its parent's checksum goes into it. A change on the parent therefore re-reads its variants as well, and that is intended: a variant may inherit its values from the parent, so what arrives at the variant changes along with it.

How the transfer plan is built

The task has two plans, Product and Product Variant, and above them sits the tab bar that switches between them. Below it lies the second tab bar with the sections.

Transfer plan of the products download task with the plans Product and Product Variant and the opened Selection section

Both plans carry the same seven sections:

Section What sits in it
Selection Condition, meaning which of the shop's products go along at all, Existing Item, meaning how TRADElube recognizes the counterpart, and New Item, meaning whether a product not yet known is created
Common The fields on the product itself, among them Product Number as a mandatory assignment, Parent Product, Manufacturer, Tax Rate as well as weight and dimensions
Descriptions The texts, one tab per language version with Name as a mandatory assignment, plus the description and the fields for search engines
Media The product's images and the question of which one is the cover
Prices One tab per price group, with one assignment per bulk position inside it
Properties One tab per property
Categories The categories the product sits in inside the shop

The sections for languages, prices and properties start out empty. You add there, through a button each, what you actually want to take over. While a section holds a single tab there is no tab bar in it either.

What separates the two plans is inheritance. In the plan Product an assignment takes its value from the shop's product. In the plan Product Variant the same value is preset as a script, and that script falls back to the parent article where the variant itself delivers nothing. That is exactly how Shopware handles it too: whatever is not set on the variant comes from the parent. So in the plan Product Variant the parent's sources stand alongside the variant's own.

Existing Item is where a decision pays off. It answers what TRADElube does when a product of the shop has no channel mapping yet. The choices are With Product Number, With Manufacturer Product Number and With EAN: TRADElube then looks among your products for one with the same value and links itself to it. That is the way to bind an already maintained set of products to a shop afterwards without ending up with it twice.

Media and Categories carry a choice above the table, Disabled or Mapped. Mapped means TRADElube only takes over images and categories it recognizes through their channel mapping. So the order is Categories Download and Media Download first, then the products. Disabled leaves the section out entirely, which is the right setting when the category tree or the images are maintained in TRADElube.

In the section Properties there is more to choose from than the shop keeps as properties. Where your selection property is mapped to a property group of the shop in the channel's Properties tab, that group's values are available as a source, separately for the variant axis and for the property on the product. Independently of that, every tab offers Product SEO URL and Product URL, meaning the address the article can be reached at in the shop. A property that takes that address is the simplest way to jump from TRADElube into the shop.

Special features and limits

The parent article comes before its variants, and the reading order is what does it: the execution fetches the products sorted by parent product and product number. Where a parent was skipped, because the condition excludes it for instance, its variants are skipped as well, and the traces say so with a reference to the parent. A variant without its parent would be a product without a family in TRADElube.

The tax rate is found through its percentage, not through a mapping. TRADElube reads the percentage from the shop and searches your tax rates for it. If that rate does not exist on your side, the field stays empty and you only notice it on the product. That is the difference from the channel's twelve tabs, where you pair external and internal by hand.

Products Download and Products Upload maintain the same channel mapping. If both run on one channel, the order of the executions decides which side dictates the price. So settle per channel where the catalogue is maintained.

What the shop does not keep does not come along. This task does not fetch stock, and there is no task of its own for it either: stock is kept by the side that holds the goods, and that is not the shop.

Further reading