Setup Wizard - Data Feed

Your data feed is what drives SearchSpring's powerful search and faceting. You need to give us information about how we can fetch data about your products. This data must be stored on the web, but can be protected by simple HTTP authentication. Your files can be a CSV, XML, RSS Feed, or many other different formats. You also probably want your catalog of products kept up to date. You can also set up how often you'd like us to update your products here as well.

Data Feed Location

URL

This is the URL of your data feed.

Data Feed Security

SearchSpring supports downloading data feeds from URLs that are password protected using Basic Access Authentication. To enable this feature, simply enter the appropriate username and password. We strongly recommend the use of a secure (HTTPS) data feed URL in conjunction with Basic Access Authentication. This helps to ensure that the password is transmitted securely and that prying eyes won't see the password. Simply ensure that your data feed can be accessed securely via HTTPS and use the appropriate URL starting with https:// in the Data Feed Location above. Contact your IT department, web host or E-Commerce service provider for implementation assistance.

Username

Your Basic Access Authentication username.

Password

Your Basic Access Authentication password.

Data Feed Format

Format

The format of your data feed. The availabe format types:

Encoding

The character encoding used within your data feed. Consistent and valid encoding is important to ensure the best display of special characters like trademark symbols or non-English letters. SearchSpring will attempt to auto-detect encoding and convert text accordingly, however specifying the correct encoding is a good idea. If you're not sure what encoding your data feed employs, it's better not to guess. (This is one of the geeky, technical things that must be exactly right.)

CSV Feed Format Configuration

The CSV Feed Format Configuration only appears if you previously selected CSV with Header Row as your feed format.

Delimiter

The character separating each field in your datafeed.

Multiple Option Values?

You can list data within a field as multi-valued, delimited, when multiple options are available for the product. For example: "blue,black,red"

XML Feed Format Configuration

The XML Feed Format Configuration only appears if you previously selected XML (Simple) as your feed format.

Record Element

The name of the XML element that contains each record. In the following example, "Product" would be the record element.

<Products>
    <Product ID="123984">
        <SKU>10-500XY</SKU>
        <Name>Widget X</Name>
    </Product>
    <Product ID="324534">
        <SKU>30-100AA</SKU>
        <Name>Just Another Item</Name>
    </Product>
</Products>

Unique Key

The name of the attribute or element that contains the unique key for each record (such as a unique SKU or Product ID).
In order to minimize conflicts, specify attribute names using the notation [ElementName]_[AttributeName]. In the following example, use Product_ID to reference the Product's ID attribute or SKU to reference the Product's SKU child element.

<Products>
    <Product ID="123984">
        <SKU>10-500XY</SKU>
        <Name>Widget X</Name>
    </Product>
    <Product ID="324534">
        <SKU>30-100AA</SKU>
        <Name>Just Another Item</Name>
    </Product>
</Products>

Automatic Updates

This section controls how often SearchSpring will re-index your data feed in order to present up-to-date search results. The update interval should reflect a reasonable setting based on the frequency of updates to your data feed. (Manual updates can be requested at any time from the Status tab.)

Interval

How often you would like SearchSpring to re-index your data feed.

Time of Day

This options enables the election of a specific time of day to re-index your data feed.

Please note:

• This option doesn't apply to hourly update intervals.
• This time setting will not automatically change for daylight savings.

Regenerate Data Feed Before Update

The data feed regeneration mechanism allows SearchSpring to trigger the update of data feeds on remote systems. This feature is designed for scenarios where scheduling a process or script to regularly update your data feed is difficult (e.g. when scheduling CRON jobs on your web server isn't allowed).

This feature should only be used when job scheduling alternatives are not available. The best options for automation include CRON jobs on Linux-based hosting environments or the Windows Task Scheduler. These solutions provide your IT staff or web development agency with the best level of configuration and control.

In cases where this feature is appropriate, the following documentation explains how developers can write a custom regeneration script to take advantage of this SearchSpring feature.

Simple Operation:

When SearchSpring calls your script via HTTP GET, execute the appropriate actions to regenerate the data feed at the location provided in the Data Feed Location URL. When finished, simply respond with the word "Complete" to indicate successful completion. SearchSpring will then download the data feed and begin the indexing operation.

Interative Operation:

In cases where regeneration scripts may timeout before generating the entire feed, this method allows scripts to generate data feeds iteratively, in smaller chunks, through the use of multiple HTTP GET request and response cycles.

Use the @offset placeholder to designate a query parameter that SearchSpring will pass with the current iteration's record offset for processing. Here's an example regneration URL:

http://www.example.com/regenerate-datafeed.php?offset=@offset

Here's a complete example for regenerating a data feed with 3000 total records over three iterations:

Enable

Check to enable data feed regeneration.

URL

The URL SearchSpring should use to access your regeneration script.