Customized Commerce + PIM

With the Optimizely Product Information Management (PIM) integration, you can manage detailed product information in the PIM and synchronize product data to Optimizely Customized Commerce.

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Note
• Commerce dependency: version 14.0.0 and higher.
• EPiServer.Commerce.PIM: version 1.0.0 and higher.
• The current integration is a beta version

About Optimizely PIM

The PIM manages detailed product information such as size, weight, color, and associated images. You can set up the catalog and product data requirements and manage the data acquisition and curation process.

Integration contains a set of scheduled jobs for synchronization of the information with Optimizely Customized Commerce system overview.

Install and configure

Add the PIM integration by installing the EPiServer.Commerce.PIM NuGet package to your Optimizely Commerce site. The integration package contains the EPiServer.Commerce.PIM integration project, including a set of scheduled jobs for data synchronization.

Configuration settings

After installing the package, add the following configuration settings to the Customized Commerce attribute in the appSettings.json file and define values as described in the following example.

Commerce: {
      "PIMOptions": {
        "Environment": "",
        "AppKey": "",
        "SecretKey": "",
        "NumberOfLookbackDays": "",
        "APIAddress": ""
      }
}

Configuration keys


Key	Description
Environment	Values: Production or Sandbox. Setting for current site environment. This must match the setting in PIM > Configure > Settings > Active Publishing Environment.
AppKey	The application key (instance key) to connect to PIM API.
SecretKey	The secret key (instance secret ) to connect PIM API.
NumberOfLookbackDays	Number of days, used in Refresh mode to get product records based on the published date. Default value is 5 days.
APIAddress	Root URL of PIM API endpoint. Default value is `<https://pim.insitecloud.net/>`

Scheduled jobs

The PIM integration package contains a set of scheduled jobs for managing data synchronization with Customized Commerce. Scheduled jobs are managed from the CMS Admin view.

Synchronize setup data

PIM: Synchronize setup data is set up early in the implementation process by the implementation team. You should run the job at initiation to pull in languages, websites, product relationships, and product custom properties. Run the job from a Sandbox or Production instance, not a partner QA site, and run the job when new catalogs, languages, metaclasses, metafields or relationship types (AssociationGroupDefinition) are added or updated.

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Note

The catalogs in Customized Commerce site will be synced to the PIM as websites. After the PIM: Synchronize setup data job is finished, you can map the PIM category tree to one website (Catalog) to integrate with Customized Commerce. If you select more than one website, an error occurs when you run the PIM: Publish approved products job.

The catalog data (categories, products, and variants) synchronization occurs only from PIM to Commerce. So if you try to create catalog data (categories, products, and variants) outside of PIM, it is discarded after you run "PIM: Publish approved products" job.

Publish approved products

The PIM: Publish approved products job runs whenever you want Approved products to be pulled into the active environment of your choice – either Sandbox (early in the project) or Production (once live). It pulls in products with the status Approved, and then updates the status in the PIM to Published. You can set the job as recurring or run on-demand.

Refresh published products

The PIM: Refresh published products job keeps non-production environments synced with the PIM as needed. It uses the lookback days parameter in the job to pull in products with Published status, based on the date last published, into the environment you are running the job from. You also can use this for development environments. It should typically only be run on-demand.

Attributes

From EPiServer.Commerce.PIM version 1.0.0, we introduce 2 attributes: NoSync and Sync that can control the integration between the Customized Commerce and PIM instances.


#	Attribute name	Applied on	Description
1	NoSync	Product or variant classes	Prevents a template class to be synchronized.
2	Sync	Properties in a product or variant class	Synchronize the property over to PIM. Fields marked with the Sync property will automatically be read-only inside B2C.

The default behavior if there is no attribute to be used: Product and Variant classes will be synchronized but Properties of Product and Variant classes will not be synchronized.

NoSync attribute

Example with a variation template that will not be synchronized over to the PIM.

Sync attribute

Example of 2 properties, FabricType property being synchronized over and WebsiteColor which will not be synchronized over. The synced FabricType property will be required and translatable in the PIM.