Data feeds addon

There is a new addon called Data feeds under the ADDONS section.



You should install this addon first and you will see the new link “Data feeds” under the “Administration” section.



So, data feed is a group of the “rules”. For each data feed you can define some general settings, products, which will be exported, and the necessary fields, which will be used for export.

You can create any number of feeds. And now you can just click the export link and get the products (download, export to server or upload to FTP), which you defined before in this data feed.



Also, you can use CRON to export products by the timeline. You should select the type of the cron export for your data feeds and use the following line to run the script according to schedule:



php /path/to/cart/admin.php --dispatch=exim.cron_export --cron_password=MYPASS


Where MYPASS is the password, which you can specify in the Dada feeds addon settings.



Feel free to test this addon and post your comments or suggestions.

This is probably going to sound pretty newbie, but could someone please explain what data feeds are. I take it that data feeds send data to somewhere, but where is somewhere? I haven’t ever done any blogging, twittering, facebook, or etc. so maybe this is why I don’t understand?



I would appreciate any decent explanation.



Thank you,



Brandon

First of all you can read this: [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_feeds[/url]

And also the topic in this forum: [url]http://forum.cs-cart.com/showthread.php?t=1211&highlight=data+feed[/url]

I would like to import XML Products Data Feeds from www.icecat.biz … Someone knows if is there a way to do it, please?.

Hi Alexions,



Regarding the data feed - there needs to be a few extra options.



The first obvious one is that there is no way to map to either the SEO friendly url or the messy URL for a product or category. Both mapping options should be available as google base does not allow you to post a product URL that performs a redirect, etc.



The second is that sometimes we may need to export a field that doesn’t necessarily vary and so we need to also be able to export placeholder constants.



For example, google base product feeds require the field ‘condition’ which is generally either used or new. I have to create a hidden product feature and populate it for all products just to map this through the feed. It would be better if I could assign a value to a field - so that instead of having to create a useless field for me in order to map, I can just set the value for all rows in the feed manually.

[quote name=‘jagorny’]For example, google base product feeds require the field ‘condition’ which is generally either used or new. I have to create a hidden product feature and populate it for all products just to map this through the feed. It would be better if I could assign a value to a field - so that instead of having to create a useless field for me in order to map, I can just set the value for all rows in the feed manually.[/QUOTE]

The Google base export already does this along with the option to choose URL format. However, I think you are right that these should be integrated into the data feeds addon which would make the Google base export redundant.



Bob

Thanks Bob…



I’m an idiot - I totally didn’t see the google base addon. Why I have no idea.

we actually wrote a couple of data feeds for CS cart among them data feeds for shopping.com, myshopping.com.au you can have a look at www.module-shop.com

cs already has the data feed addon included in the default installation…

After the recent 2.1.4 upgrade I enabled these and read about data feeds in general.



Does this mean I can export my product data to other websites apart from Google Base, or does that mean I can show products from other websites?



Someone mentioned Yahoo - how would that work?



Thanks in advance,



Michael

Yea, theoretically it should allow you to export your products to all sites which allow for the submission of data feeds.



It’s not made for showing products from other websites.

[quote]

After the recent 2.1.4 upgrade

[/quote]

Huh? My file area still shows 2.1.2…

it would be great there more improvements for datafeed, for eample :



XLS format support and XML support

utf_8 support

strip_tag html code for field

possibility to create blank field

[quote name=‘creativeuser’]it would be great there more improvements for datafeed, for eample :



XLS format support and XML support

utf_8 support

strip_tag html code for field

possibility to create blank field[/quote]



I agree



This add-on is of no good for anyone who uses HTML in product descriptions. I filed a bug report about this but got the “Working as designed” response

[quote]

utf_8 support

strip_tag html code for field

possibility to create blank field

[/quote]

Our XML Data Feeds addon does all of the above. Since it generates XML data, there is no reason you couldn’t add special XLS processing before passing along to Google or other shopping aggregators. Info on the addon can be viewed at:[url]http://www.ez-ms.com/addonproducts/xml-data-feeds.html[/url]. Docs are in the attachments tab.

of course, but it’s important for me to generate multiple datafeeds for each aggregators with custom fields and possibility to send file on FTP for each aggregators.

I thought you wanted to run XSLT on the XML before sending to your aggregators.



Unfortunatley no one can know your custom fields and providing for them adds a lot of complexity to a product and also creates a giant support nightmare.



The two file formats we support should be covered by any other aggregator that is serious about getting a lot of merchants. Hard to go wrong with Yahoo and Google.



But if your needs are beyond this and you can’t use XSLT to modify those XML files then I guess you’ll have to come up with a custom solution.

Does anyone know how to get the id into the data feed addon’s export?



The id is part of the Google Base export feature, but is not an option when building a new data feed.



Google requires this attribute in order for the data feed to be accepted. This seems to be an automatically generated number by the system since there is no place to enter in this information.



Here is Google’s explanation as to what an id is:



id [id]



A unique alphanumeric identifier for each item- e.g. your internal ID code.

IMPORTANT:



Once an item is submitted the unique id cannot change when you update your data feed.

Item identifiers must be unique within your account. If you have multiple feeds, items within different feeds must still have a unique identifier.



Type Alphanumeric characters

Text/Tab delimited tddy123uk

XML g:id>tddy123uk

I believe it uses the product_id as the id attribute of the Product tag.

The product_id isn’t an option when building a list of exported fields in the Data Feeds addon.



Under the Google Base export it is. I’m not sure why they would include that variable in the Google Base export and not the Data Feed one.



Any other ideas?