Categories Upload
The task creates your categories in the WooCommerce shop, on the level configured on the channel in the External Root Category field. 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 in TRADElube a category is created in the shop, with its name and its description.
Which categories those are is decided by the channel, not by this task. What counts is the Root Category field in the channel's Configuration section: with nothing in it the whole tree goes, with a category in it only the subtree below it. So this task's transfer plan has no Selection section with a condition of its own.
The tree is built from the top down. A category's turn only comes once its parent has arrived in the shop, so that it can refer to the parent's counterpart. If a category fails, its subcategories are left for this execution rather than created in the wrong place.
How the transfer plan is built
One plan with two sections.
| Section | What sits in it |
|---|---|
| Common | The single assignment Parent Category Id, which hangs the category in the shop under its parent |
| Description | Name as a mandatory assignment and Description, each with one source per language version of your client |
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.
Description is unticked out of the box, Name is not. If you want category texts in the shop, tick the row and pick the language version. Leave it as it is and the text in the shop stays untouched.
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 either of the two category fields 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.
Where a category disappears in TRADElube, the next execution removes its counterpart in the shop. The products that sat in it stay and merely lose that assignment. That is the price of the shop not maintaining the structure itself: whoever keeps the tree here keeps all of it.
There is no other direction. You cannot take over a category tree maintained in the shop on this channel.
Further reading
- WooCommerce: prerequisites, connection, mappings and the other eight tasks
- Products Upload (WooCommerce): the task building on this one's result
- Categories (reference): the category tree in the client and how you maintain it
- Transfer plan (concepts): plan, section and assignment, plus the three ways to determine a value