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Input formats for products

Rumyana Grigorova
  • Updated

    This section details the input formats for products. It describes format requirements and content guidelines for products and categories.

    Input format

    This section describes the two CSV files required for Fredhopper's base solution:

    • categories.csv: Holds each of the categories with an id, locale, parent and name
    • products.csv: Holds the basic product information required for Fredhopper to start

    Please ensure that the file names mentioned above are exactly the names of the files you provide to Fredhopper.

    Content guidelines
    Ensure for both CSV files:
    • Columns are separated by double tabs \t\t
    • UTF-8 encoded with standard PC end of line sequencing
    • Only printable characters (i.e. no control characters)
    • All columns are in the defined order and have the defined headers.
    • Encode linebreaks in fields as \n
    • Contain at least 2 Carriage Returns

    Categories

    All categories have to be provided in a CSV file called categories.csv. The parent ID of the root category has to point to itself. The top level category is always a single category.

    Field Description
    category_id identifier of the category
    parent_category_id parent of the category
    locale i18n localization if exists
    name name of the category for the defined locale

    For example, using 'catalog01' as root category:

    category_id parent_category_id locale name
    catalog01 catalog01 en_US Shop
    catalog01 catalog01 de_DE Geschaeft
    women catalog01 en_US Women
    women catalog01 de_DE Damen
    shoes catalog01 en_US Shoes
    shoes catalog01 de_DE Schuhe
    We advise that all values of category_id start with a lowercase character.

    Products

    All products have to be provided in a CSV file called products.csv with the following standard fields:

    Field Description Allowed values
    product_id Identifier of the product Please only use identifiers matching [a-z0-9_]+. Refrain from using numeric only identifiers, unless you make sure that ids do not clash between items used in different universes, for example by adding a symbolic prefix to the numeric ids. The indexer will not enforce any format, by default, and hence will accept all item ids.
    locale i18n localization definition in case of multi lingual implementation Empty or a valid Java Locale.
    category_ids Identifiers of the lowest level categories in which the product resided. In case a product is in multiple categories the id's they should be separated by a space. A category id should match [a-z0-9]+. We recommend refraining from using the "" in category ids. The indexer will only complain about it, but using "" may interfere with how the system represents the hierarchy of categories. If the indexer encounters a category id that does not match the pattern, it will try to generate a matching one, replacing the offending symbols with their hexadecimal representation.

    For example:

    product_id locale category_ids
    p_123456 de_DE women shoes
    p_123456 en_US women shoes
    We advise that all values of product_id start with the characters p_ . This will help to distinguish product ids from variant ids.
    If you also want to include product variants, please consult Input formats for variants. If you want to include additional custom attributes please consult Input formats for custom attributes.

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