Icecat Release Notes April 13, 2020: XSD, Data, Vendor Central and Frontoffice Improvements

Upgrade of product search for editorial process automation

We improved the editorial workflow in our Vendor Central PIM for content editors somewhat:

• The booking of products is skipped when an editor starts to describe and own a product that was previously “undescribed” or “to do”.
• Only the editor who booked a product can describe this product, no other editor can add images, multimedia objects, product specs etc. to the product data-sheet.
• Between comments a semicolon is added in the Status column as a visual separator.

Feed Philips by Signify

The current API feed from Philips by Signify works in three days batches. Per batch import, we are getting lots of updates regarding different lamps, which are useful for Signify’s channel partners in their webshops. We changed the logic so that account managers can receive a report regarding how many product the API-in has processed, how many new products are added or skipped, and which attributes need to be mapped to get more products or product information from the Philips by Signify feeds, such as categories, families, and specs. It helps us to analyze and support this API-in process better.

Feed HP

Implemented the support of GTINs in the system, not every one separate, but in batch. It means that we are sending now several GTINs at the same time, which reduces the I/O load of the database and improves the speed of processing GTINs.

Next steps:

• Supporting new multimedia objects such as EU Energy Labels from HP.
• Updating the report generator to differentiate the use of product data-sheets per API-type (XML, JSON, Live, Front Office), per country, per subscribed language, per business type etc.

Changed XSD schema

For our main API-out – XML – we have in the system XSD schema where our users can find all definitions regarding every tag in Icecat’s XML output and what to expect from it. See: https://bo.icecat.biz/xsd/ICECAT-interface_response.xsd

For now, we improved this XSD schema and corrected it for one discrepancy regarding the definition of Feature Logo Value.

Coverage report – create API with better speed

Coverage report from file – it is existing functionality which was working too slow, and all account managers experienced this problem. For instance, a coverage report with more than 600k of products could take several days.

The dev team has improved the speed of this coverage report. The first step is finished: to create a new API to create this report quicker than before.

Example results:

• the coverage from file report for 100k of products: created in 11 minutes;
• coverage from file with 1 million of products: created in 2 hours.

For now, as the speed of the new coverage from file report is far better and suffices, we paused further improvements till a new bottleneck is reached.

Yoo can see ournew public API at https://api.icecat.biz/

Applying deduplication to short and long summary descriptions

In all our interfaces, deduplication is implemented for Short and Long Summary Descriptions as we have it in the product Title already. Below the Before and After situation:

Frontoffice: Redesigned ICURY page

In the scope of our user back-office redesign epic, we improved the ICURY page. UI looks great, UX is improved. The next page on our to do list is My Downloads!

Frontoffice: security improvement by encrypting the fields in Redis cache

In the scope of our on-going security improvement process, we applied encryption to the Redis cache that we use. We’re staying in close touch with the latest technologies!

Brand Page: added non-listed brands and reordered the sorting

We moved non-alphabetical characters to the end of the brand index and start now by default with the letter “A”.

Support

• Created a report for February for the Product Story asset based on statistical info collected.
• Fixed the original link been missing for product gallery in the frontoffice for all pictures except for the first one.