Feed-Engine
For external sales portals (e.g. Google, Facebok etc.) feeds of relevant articles are needed. With the help of the feed engine you can generate such feeds easily and quickly in Makaira. Feeds are retrievable via a URL and are created anew with each retrieval. A time-consuming setup for the time-controlled creation of a feed is therefore not necessary. If feeds are used for automatic processing in other systems, we offer a notification by mail in case something goes wrong. Contact the support if you want to use this option.
The content of a feed is always up to date because it is generated dynamically with each retrieval.
Article selection
1. Which articles should be exported ?
- Task (example)
You want to create a feed that exports all active articles of a certain manufacturer, which are available in the colors red, green or blue. - a) Filter for father articles
-
Creation of a primary stream, which defines a filter over all available parent articles
Example: all active items and manufacturer equal to "Adidas".
- b) Filter for variants
- Creation of a secondary Streams, which filters the variants per parent article (only relevant if variants are to be exported as well)
-
Example: all active items that are available (stock > 0) and attribute "color" equals "red" or "green" or "blue".
The search logic filters all parent articles by means of the primary product stream. If variants are also exported, all variants per parent article are filtered by means of the secondary product stream. If no secondary product stream is specified, each parent article contains all its variants.
Basic settings
2. URL, format and co.
- Name
- the configurable part of the URL under which the feed will be called later (allowed characters are letters and digits, everything else will be converted to an underscore)
stream - filter for parent articles (mandatory)
the stream configured in step 1.a
- Export parent article?
- Parent articles should be exported in my feed
- Parent articles should be exported in my feed?
- Variants should be exported in my feed
- Export parent article only if no variants exist
-
- there are variants exported in my feed and parent articles which have no variants
- "none" means, the parent article can have variants, but the filter for variants will result in an empty set
- this option requires that Export parent article? is enabled
Example: variants only
- Stream - Filter for variants (optional)
- if necessary, the stream configured in step 1.b, otherwise all variants per parent item are delivered by default
- Content-Type
-
the data format in which the feed should be created
(technically: the value for the HTTP header "Content-Type")
- Separator for fields
- (CSV only) defines the separator of the data columns in the feed
Field wrapper
(CSV only) defines the character with which data values should be flanked
Show column names in first row?
(CSV only) the first row in the feed should contain the column names
Header - (no CSV) rendered in front of all articles
- Footer
- (no CSV) Twig-Template rendered after the last article.
-
Example: XML Header & Footer
- String for end of line
- defines a string which is written at the end of each article/variant (no template)
optional variables (expert mode) -
Twig-Template, which is included before each template of the data fields (for global functions/variables, e.g. store URL).
Example: global variables or functions
optonal variables(expert mode)
...
Data structure & output
3. Which article data should be exported ?
Task (example)
You want to export the following item data in your feed:
- the item number
- the name
- the price (formatted to 2 decimal places)
- the detailed description (truncated to max. 200 characters)
You create the data structure for your feed under Customize structure from the feed overview.
In the first column you should enter the title. The second column should contain the data field from which the value for the respective entry in the feed should be taken.
Example: Structure for the task constructed above
Now we want to format the price always to 2 decimal places. To do this, we click Edit Output in the corresponding line to edit the default template.
The expression used for this will output our item in the desired format. For a detailed explanation of the possibilities of the template engine used see Twig-Templates.
To trim the description text to 200 characters, we also edit this template.
Using the optional variables (see basic settings) we can make this formatting flexible here.
In the end, our feed structure should look something like this.
Twig-Template
What is a Twig template?
Twig is a template engine for Symfony. A complete overview of all tags, filters, functions, tests and operators included in the Twig base package can be found in the Twig Documentation. All with detailed examples.
Predefined template variables
Header & Footer
language-
the language used in the feed (selection via URL)
header-
Labeling of all data columns
fields-
Field identifier of the data columns
Feed content variables
iCountLine-
contains the current line number
language-
the language used in the feed (selection via URL)
header-
Labeling of all data columns
fields-
Field identifier of the data columns
item-
current data value
feedItem-
current data set (complete document)
iCountVariantMax-
Total number of all variants of a parent article
Variables for feed content for variants (also called makaira-product)
iCountParent
Counter of parent articles containing variants (useful when rendering variants only).
parent
current father article (only when rendering a variant)
Feed content variables for products (also called makaira-productgroup)
iCountVariant
Counter of the current variant
makaira-product-
Array of all variants of the product or all variants that match the configured variant stream. Attention: Only available if both products and variants are output in the feed.
To test the feed, it is recommended to create a primary stream that filters only a few articles. This way, the feed requires few resources or time during the testing phase.