Google Base Feed

[batmike]

It seems that Google Base has changed their specifications for their feeds. The "category" attribute is no longer supported and I don't see a new attribute to take its place, unless we use a custom attribute. Also, the "description" attribute is now required. I would have gone in and changed it but I think the export routine is built into the system futher in than I can track down now.

Maybe someone else knows where to find it or has had this problem as well.

Mike

[nborelli]

As far as I can tell, the CommerceBuilder.DataFeeds.GoogleBase class in the CommerceBuilder.dll assembly does this. The class descends from the FeedProviderBase and implements the IFeedProvider interface. However, the GetFeedData(ProductCollection products)
methods is obfuscated and I cannot read its source. If would be great if we had the source code for one of these feeds as a sample like we do with the Authorize.net payment gateway.

Regards,
-Neal

[cerami2]

Ihave been getting the same problem is there a fix for this

Regards
Joe

[jmestep]

Attention, Joe.......
This would be a good add-on for you to sell since you've gained so much experience with importing data.
Having the generating code into a piece of code that we can't get to as it is now, is going to cause us all problems. Some of us want to do different things, like use a description field instead of summary, and we can't change the feeds now even if the companies change their specs.
If it's reasonably priced, I would buy it if I could get a big client to cough up the money!

[AbleMods]

I have completed most of my testing on my new feed maker routine. It creates Google Base feed files (in XML) quite well and even explodes variant products properly. It will also automatically adds an AC7 Affiliate ID if you want to use the AC7 affiliate tracking to monitor ROI. The user interface isn't polished and I want some more filtering capabilities, but the file format is solid and working well.

I'm still working on Shopzilla and Shopping.com formats. Not everyone uses XML (bad assumption on my part), so I've had to back-pedal a little and plan for both CSV and XML output based on the CPC marketing campaigns I will support.

Then it's on to Yahoo, MSN (if it's working) and PriceGrabber.com. When I'm done, one module will generate 6 different CPC file formats with plenty of filtering support. Generation speed will probably be an issue with larger store catalogs, but right now that's a reasonable tradeoff (to me) considering how few choices I have with AC7 feed makers.

[jmestep]

Generation speed- I don't care as long as it finishes sometime! In Able 5.5 on a store with 11,000 products the Froogle feed generated a .csv file that always timed out before it finished. Once I switched it to an xml feed I didn't have the problem, but I don't know what the difference was.

[AbleMods]

File format can affect it a little, but in the end you're just writing text to a disk file so the server speed/db speed has the biggest impact. In my case, I'm using a variety of filter options so it can't utilize the table indices as well as a normal query. Basically I'll be reading every record from disk to memory thus the speed hit.

If I were stronger in SQL, I could write a series of SQL commands that "whittle" down the result sets into a final set of filtered records. But stopping now to bone-up on SQL stored procedures isn't going to help my deadlines

[jmestep]

Even though it might be faster, it's probably better to not use the stored procedures because they would have to be added to the database and not everyone can do that.

[AbleMods]

Even though it might be faster, it's probably better to not use the stored procedures because they would have to be added to the database and not everyone can do that.

Good point. You can do it programmatically, but that would require even further work to make it clean and elegant.

[jmestep]

The field in the table is UnitWeight - I was just guessing in my example.

[mark@fitzz.com]

Thank you... we had just figured that out and our internet crashed! Thanks so much for your assistance.

It is outputting the data and now we went from a "tab" delimiter to apparently a "line return". But have this figured out as the "Chr(10)" is a line return and "Chr(9) is a tab.

Phew...

But your help has been amazing! Thanks!

[cerami2]

has able commerce made a fix yet for the google feed change for 7.0 .And if they had were do i find it

thanks
Joe

[jmestep]

I think they have got it done, but not released.
http://bugs.ablecommerce.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6790