Publishes a catalog

Publishes a catalog. You must publish a catalog before you can retrieve that catalog in an organization or store. The hierarchies, live products, and prices associated with a published catalog are in read-only mode. If you make a change to these resources, for example, a change to your price book or hierarchies, you need to republish the catalog.

You can get a catalog release to retrieve a published catalog. A new catalog keeps two published releases. Set max_published_releases to 1, 2, or 3. A catalog that has never stored max_published_releases keeps the current release and two releases prior to the current release.

You can see the differences between the last 2 consecutive catalog releases. This is useful if want to understand how your products have changed in your catalog, ensuring your site search integration is kept up-to-date.

Once a catalog release has completed publishing, the delta relationship links to the delta document.

The delta links are signed and only valid for 1 hour. Re-reading a catalog release, for example, using Getting a release of a catalog returns a fresh a link.

You can use the is_full_delta attribute returned from the get a release of a catalog endpoint to determine if you need to refresh the data in your company system before injecting fresh data in a delta link. The is_full_delta attribute tells you if this is a full publish of the catalog. Using a search service as an example, if the is_full_delta attribute is true, you should remove all data about that catalog from the search service before injecting fresh data from the delta file. If the is_full_delta attribute is false, then data from the previous catalog overlays the existing data in the delta file. To publish a catalog and inject fresh data in a delta link, set export_full_delta to true.

If a previous catalog publish date is greater than 90 days, then a full catalog publish is automatically performed. If you publish your catalogs infrequently, Commerce may perform a full publish when you are expecting a delta publish.

:::caution

Generating a full delta is resource intensive and slows down the publishing process and so should only be performed in certain circumstances, for example, when initializing an integration with a service like Algolia.

:::

The is_full_delta attribute is always true the first time a catalog is published. The information is stored in a collection of json documents in a compressed file. You can either manually check the file or, for example, use them to automatically update another company system you may have.

• Delta files are only available for 30 days.
• Delta files are removed when a catalog release is deleted.

Each document has a delta_type with one of the following values, depending on whether a product has been deleted, updated or created in a catalog release.

• delete describes products deleted from this release of a catalog.
• createupdate describes products updated in this release of a catalog.

Multi-Store Management Solutions

In a multi-store management solution.

• You can create organization catalogs. Your organization catalogs are available for your stores to use.
• Your stores can create their own catalogs.
• Your stores can create catalogs that have a combination of organization products and store products.

If you are publishing a catalog in a store that contains resources from an organization, in Commerce Manager, you must enable the Include Organization Resources in Catalog Publishes checkbox.

1. Go to SYSTEM > Store Settings.
2. Click General Settings.
3. Select PXM from the list.
4. Select the Include Organization Resources in Catalog Publishes checkbox.