Manufacturers
The Manufacturers area holds the brands your articles are carried under. You reach it through the Manufacturers navigation entry.
A manufacturer is a record of its own and not a label on the product. It carries its own texts, its own properties and its own channel mappings, so it is transferred into a connected system just like a product is. How it relates to product and category is described in the data model.
Overview / list
The list shows a single column: Name. Sorting is fixed to it, ascending, and as everywhere in TRADElube a click on the column header changes nothing about that.
Three buttons sit above the list. New opens an empty manufacturer. It exists only once you use Save, and until then it appears in no list. Edit opens the selected manufacturer in the detail view, Delete removes it after a confirmation. Both require a selected row, New does not.
A deleted manufacturer takes no products down with it. The articles that referred to it are kept in full, only their Manufacturer field is cleared. TRADElube marks those articles as changed while doing so, so the change goes into the connected systems on the next execution and the old manufacturer name does not stay behind there.
The Filter field below searches exactly that one column of the list, and a partial match is enough. It disappears as soon as a condition is set through Filter By.
Filter By
The Filter By button offers the groups Field, Property and Channel.
| Group | Filters by |
|---|---|
| Field | A single field of the manufacturer: Name, Link, Short Description, Description, the three meta fields, plus Created At and Modified At |
| Property | A property set up for manufacturers |
| Channel | A channel. The filter works on whether the manufacturer is mapped to that channel |
No more is needed here: a manufacturer carries neither variants nor prices nor stock that could be filtered on. How a condition you have set is edited and combined is described under products and holds here unchanged.
Below the list sit the pager, the Items per Page choice and the total number of manufacturers matching the current filter.
Detail view
The detail view shows a single manufacturer. At the very top sits the save bar with Save and Discard, below it the collapsible sections Common, Description, Properties and Channels. At the very bottom sits the record's identifier, which you only need when writing to us about exactly this record. It is explained under the user interface.
Common
The section carries the name the manufacturer is held under, and nothing else.
| Field | Meaning | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Name | The manufacturer's designation | Mandatory and unique within the client. It is at the same time the list's only column and the value a connected system receives as the brand name |
Everything else on the manufacturer is either translatable, and therefore sits under Description, or it is a property you set up yourself.
Description
This section holds everything that gets translated. The tabs at the top of the section switch between the language versions. Which ones exist is decided by your client's localizations.
The Insert button creates a further language version. Its menu shows exactly the languages that do not yet exist on this manufacturer, and it disappears once none is left. Below it sits the button that removes the currently selected language version. Its caption names that version, so Delete German for instance. For the default language it is absent, because that one cannot be deleted.
The tabs only appear from the second language version onwards. As long as only the default language is maintained, the fields sit there without tabs above them, because there would be nothing to switch between.
| Field | Meaning | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Link | The manufacturer's web address | Transferred by the channels as the manufacturer link, to the brand page in the shop for instance |
| Short Description | The short text about the brand | Switchable between a formatted view (Visual) and the HTML behind it (Html) |
| Description | The full text about the brand | Switchable in the same way |
The Meta Description subsection holds the three fields for search engines: Meta Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords. They are transferred where the channel offers fields for them.
Properties
The section shows the properties set up for manufacturers, each with the input field of its type. Properties without a group sit at the top, followed by one collapsible block per group.
The section exists only if there are any properties for manufacturers at all. If it is missing, that is not a permission problem: there is nothing to show.
Properties exist for more than just the product, and that is the point here: a framework agreement or a minimum order value belongs on the brand and not on every single article. Properties are set up under Settings, through the Properties button, and explained under properties.
Channel mappings
The Channels section shows which connected systems the manufacturer is linked to, one row per channel. Structure, fields and buttons are the same as on the product and are described there in detail: products. What a channel mapping is in the first place is described under channel mappings.
Two things are worth noting here:
- The buttons for adding exist only for channels that can transfer manufacturers. There is one per channel and it carries that channel's name: Add To 'ERP System'. A channel whose tasks know no manufacturers does not appear here at all, even where it is set up in the client. Which channel transfers what is listed under Channels and tasks.
- The table sits in a box that can be scrolled sideways. The image shows Channel, Mapping and Executed At. The Changes At and State columns sit to their right.
Further reading
- Products: the area that refers to the manufacturer, with the detailed description of the filter and the channel mappings
- Data model: how manufacturer, product and category relate
- Properties: what properties are for and why they do not hang off the product alone
- Languages and translations: what a language version is and what gets transferred without one