The web catalog of CustomerGate 365

How the decision is made

For every item it is computed whether it belongs on the website. Five steps take part, in this order, and the first one that says something decides:

1. Blocked or Sales Blocked: off the website. This is the only step nothing can override.
2. The item itself. Web Publication on the Web tab of the item card is Default, Published or Excluded. Published and Excluded win from everything below.
3. The item category, the nearest one first. An excluded category takes the categories below it and their items with it, except where an item says Published itself.
4. The publication rules, in their own order. The first rule that matches decides.
5. The policy: Only Publish Marked Items on CustomerGate Setup.

Every step leaves a reason on the item, in words: Web Publication Reason says, for example, that item category STEEL-INT is excluded, or that rule 40 decided it. It is not on the website is not an answer anyone can work with.

What a rule can look at, how an item number pattern works and in which order the rules sit is on the page about Web Publication Rules. What came out per item, and why, is on Items on the Website. Both are linked at the foot of this page.

Not Orderable Online

Not Orderable Online on the Web tab is the price-on-request case: the item is in the catalog, but a visitor cannot put it in a request. The service the website offers a request to refuses a line for such an item, and for an item that is not in the catalog at all.

That refusal does not apply to a staff order: with the customer present, everything the company sells may be sold, including what is deliberately not online. Show such an item on the website without an order button, pointing at the contact form.

What comes off: the removal list

A website that synchronizes and upserts never hears about an item that is no longer in the feed, so it keeps showing it. That is why Business Central records what leaves the catalog.

• The list receives what is excluded, what is blocked, what is deleted, and the old number of what is renamed. The new number is simply in the feed.
• A row disappears again as soon as the item returns to the catalog.
• Rows older than 180 days are cleaned up. A website that has not synchronized for half a year cannot lean on this list and must compare its whole catalog once.
• Web Catalog Removals shows the list in Business Central, reachable from the overview per item.

So ask your website builder to read this service in the same round as the other three. Without that, an item you exclude stays on the site forever.

Pictures

What is on the item card in Business Central is what the website shows. Item variants carry their own pictures, so the photo of one plate belongs to that plate and not to the item above it.

• Per item and per variant, the feed carries the number of pictures and a Picture Identifier that changes as soon as a picture is added, replaced, reordered or removed. The website fetches the bytes with a separate service, and only for what changed.
• A picture removed in Business Central reaches the website by itself: the identifier goes empty in the very feed the website already reads.
• Above Maximum Picture Size (MB) on CustomerGate Setup (10 by default) the picture is reported instead of handed over. That is deliberately not an error: one photo straight from a camera should not end a nightly run.
• A picture Business Central cannot load at all comes back the same way. That one is broken in Business Central itself: open the item card, remove it and add it again.
• Nothing is resized and nothing is converted. So put a picture on the item that is usable on the web; the website makes its own formats from it.

When it is computed

• When the app is installed, when a company is created and on every update. Each of those three computes once and overwrites nothing.
• As soon as an item, an item category or a publication rule changes, the decision for that item is brought up to date. An ordinary price or inventory change costs nothing.
• The nightly catalog job is a safety net, not the engine: it catches what an event cannot see, such as an import that skips triggers or an item attribute that changes without the item changing, and it cleans up the removal list.
• Recompute Web Catalog on CustomerGate Setup does the same round by hand. It is safe to run at any moment and changes nothing that is already correct.

A company where this never happened is an incomplete installation, and the catalog services then refuse to serve rather than hand over an unfiltered catalog. The line Catalog Decision on CustomerGate Setup says so in red. The website keeps the data it already had in the meantime; a refusal is not an empty catalog.

When the website shows something it should not

If an item has to be off right now, exclude it and let the website synchronize, or have the website run its round by hand. Blocking works too and is stronger, but it also blocks the counter.

The catalog pages

The services are read-only list pages, meant for a nightly synchronization and not for a visitor opening a page. Nobody needs to work in them; opening one shows what the website receives.

What is not in it

The item service exposes no prices, costs or inventory. The only stock figure is the Steel 365 remaining inventory per variant. Blocked and Sales Blocked are still in the item service and are always off: a blocked item is never published. So do not use them to keep items off the website; this page is for that.

With Steel 365

Where iFacto Steel 365 is installed, the app also publishes voaProfiles, voaGrades and voaItemTypes, which point at iFacto's own pages, and fills the steel columns above. Without Steel 365, those columns are empty or zero and the three extra services do not exist. If Steel 365 is installed later, the next update of CustomerGate 365 publishes them. Those three lists are reference data and are not filtered by the web catalog: build a filter list from the items you actually received.

Who can read them

Only the synchronization application from Synchronization Client ID on CustomerGate Setup, through the permission set VOA WEB SYNC, plus VOA CG S365 SYNC with Steel 365. The website application that handles requests and the portal cannot read the catalog, and the synchronization application cannot call the portal. Whoever maintains items needs nothing extra here: the recompute that runs along with an item change carries its own permissions.

If a service is missing

The app publishes its services on installation and on every update, and never changes a service that already exists. If one was unpublished or renamed by hand, check the Web Services page. Website developers find the property names in the web service reference.