Special Characteristics of Field Mapping

When installing the plugin, you will see that the following fields are created in Magento, in both the Products and Attributes menus:

“Sales Layer Product Identification”
“Sales Layer Product Company Identification”
“Sales Layer Product Format Identification”

Warning: These fields or their values work as key fields in Sales Layer. So, they shouldn’t be modified or deleted, otherwise, the products could be created again during the next synchronization.

In the case, that you already have your Magento store running, and you want to start your first Sales Layer synchronization, these key fields will be empty. To avoid duplicates, a search will be performed among the existing elements according to the following rules:

if it’s a category, the search will be done by URL Key and then by parent ID (in case it has been synchronized before).
if it is a product, the search will be done by SKU, if no matches can be found, the search will be done by name.
variants will be searched by SKU.

In case no matches are found, they will be created.

Categories - Layout/ Is Anchor

These two categories of fields are inherited by the default parameters configured when creating the Magento connector. In the case, that you need a different configuration for different categories, you can map this information in the connector by using the “Layout” and “Is Anchor” fields in the Categories tab. For more information on these fields, you can go to: https://docs.magento.com/user-guide/catalog/categories-display-settings.html and https://docs.magento.com/user-guide/catalog/categories-custom-design.html.

Products - Grouped products

One of the product types you can find in Magento refers to “Grouped Products” and you can send them using our plugin.

Grouped products can be Simple Products, Virtual Products, or Downloadable products, taking into account the availability of the item if previously configured to manage stock.

Please, note that as stated in the “Supported and non-supported features” section of this manual, downloadable products are not supported by our plugin.

Warning: Magento does not allow products other than Simple, Virtual, or Downloadable. As a result, the type of product must be taken into account when sending grouped products, so that the connector can process them.

You can group products using two predefined fields:

grouping_product_reference_1: this field is used to link to a related item field using a single reference.
grouping_product_reference_X: Replacing X with a number equal to or greater than 2 if you want to send more than one product. You must create as many fields as the products you want to group in Magento.

Note: the grouping_product_reference_X field only accepts one reference per field: in the event that the field contains more than one reference, only the first one will be sent to Magento.

Warning: the reference being processed cannot be included as a grouped reference. In other words, the product grouping references cannot contain itself. Variants of the same product cannot be grouped either.

Sending grouping_product_quantity_1 or grouping_product_quantity_X, where X is a number equal to or greater than 2, we will send the stock quantity for the grouped product corresponding to the index written in the name of the field.

Note: if you do not send the grouping_product_quantity_X field, the value will result in 0 in Magento.

You will be able to group variants using the same rule, but replacing “product” with “format” or “variant” in the field name.

Variants

Different products can have different attributes in their variants. However, it is not possible to have the same product variants with different attributes. That is, all variants under the same parent product need to have the same attributes filled in, otherwise, they will not be synchronized.

For example, it is not possible to have one variant of a product with only “size” selected, and another variant of the same product with “color” selected. Both variants should have both “size” and “color”, or only one of these attributes selected.

Variants as products

Version 2.4.7 and above of our plugin gives the option to process Sales Layer variants as products in Magento, which means that the variants you have in Sales Layer will be synchronized as single products in Magento.

To select this option in the Sales Layer plugin, you will need to set the following parameter to "Yes":

After selecting this option, the products table in the Output Data tab will be automatically hidden, and the existing product fields will be added to the variants table. In addition, previously placed filters in the products tab will be removed to avoid hidden filters and to make sure that information is sent correctly.

Points to take into account about API operation

On initial synchronization or connector refreshes, all products will be sent.
When modifying a variant, all the variations of the product will be sent by the connector filters. If a product in Sales Layer has 50 variants, when changing a variant, 50 will be synchronized.
When modifying a variant, the top-level parent element (parent product of the variant) will be sent. Therefore, if you want to send categories, we recommend changing the status and modifying them together with the variants you want to synchronize.

Points to take into account regarding the process

All variant fields will be converted to product fields.
As the product table is not active in the connector, filtering items will only be possible at the category or variant level.
Variants will be synchronized with the categories associated with their parent products. If the option to send blank categories is set to "Yes", all the categories filtered by the connector will be synchronized, if it is set to ‘No’, only those categories associated with products with variants will be synchronized. Don’t forget that it is mandatory to have categories on the products to generate the main item in Magento.
Additional fields (for configurable attributes) will be changed to product attributes, but the operation in Magento is the same.
The grouped product fields should have the following nomenclature on the variant tab: 'grouping_format_reference_X' / 'grouping_variant_reference_X' and 'grouping_format_quantity_X' / 'grouping_variant_quantity_X'. On reorganization, they will be converted, so that they can be processed as products.
The Sales Layer IDs for the variant will be changed to those of the product, so if the 'Process variants as products' option is disabled, either the existing products will need to be deleted, or the Sales Layer attribute values will need to be removed from the database. Otherwise, the data will be overwritten when synchronizing, which could lead to duplication errors.
Variants that you wish to delete or modify, will be converted into products to be deleted to allow them to be disabled.