Adding of Free fields (features/attributes):
In Winstore you have a defined set of variables, as a customer you cannot simply add fields by yourself. Therefor it can be difficult to achieve a functionality that does not naturally occur in Winstore. One of these functionalities is variants and their parents.
To facilitate this desired functionality, you require field information provided by the ACA helpdesk. Usually the Winstore is configured to support variant information based on attributes. However this is not unified and standard. Therefor, before continuing to the configuration, you need to have the field name information for which your Winstore is configured.
Configuring in ApiCenter
When the Winstore environment has been fully populated with technique described above, and you have received the technical information about the fieldnames, it is time to set ApiCenter to the correct configuration, to load in variant products and their parents.
First; you will need to specify which attribute is mapped to which attribute in the secondary application. Remember, an attribute is what makes a product unique, like size and colour for example. Do not include features (like material, origin) in this mapping table. Below an example how this is configured for one of our customers.
NOTE: your data field names can differ in naming convention. Check the document you received from ACA helpdesk for actual naming of these fields.
Secondly; you need to define the features of a product. Remember a feature is what all variants of a model share, like the material the product was made from, or the country of manufacture for example. Below an example how this is configured for one of our customers.
NOTE: your data field names can differ in naming convention. Check the document you received from ACA helpdesk for actual naming of these fields.
Thirdly; it is very important to understand the logic in which Winstore operates. Winstore combines products and their variants based on size. Usually not by colour. For each colour a different model is usually defined with a unique product number. However on a webshop you usually want to combine colour and size to 1 single product with all the variants related to size and colour.
If the described situation also applies for you, you will need to adjust the default mapping, check the default field for the mapping for 'model'. And change the default 'ArtikelNr' to 'ArtikelBez'
NOTE: make sure the information in 'ArtikelBez' is identical for every product and variant belonging to the same 'model'. This is a requirement for this functionality to work.