Most new ATG customers have content from past product catalogs in a legacy system and will use that content as a basis for their ATG product catalogs, which are organized into repository data sets. The way you approach exporting this content depends largely on the system that currently holds your content and the data itself. For the most part, consult your legacy system documentation for exporting instructions, however, before you export content, you need to know what format the import mechanism expects. ATG includes two importing tools:
The startSQLRepository script imports content formatted in an XML file into content or SQL repositories. See the startSQLRepository script and Template Parser section in the ATG Repository Guide.
The Repository Loader is a module that conducts single or scheduled imports of XML, HTML, binary, and file system files into content or SQL repositories. See the Repository Loader chapter of the ATG Repository Guide for information.
Keep in mind that the XML files parsed by the startSQLRepository script are easier to write than their Repository Loader counterparts, however, running the Repository Loader uses less memory than the startSQLRepository script.
It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with repositories in general by reading through the Introduction and Repository API chapters of the ATG Repository Guide as well as the documentation on the commerce repositories available to you. The commerce repositories you use depend on whether your sites uses standard or custom catalogs, which are described in the Using and Extending the Standard Catalog and Using Custom Catalogs chapters respectively in the ATG Commerce Programming Guide. Learning about the repositories you’ll use will help you understand the format required by the ATG importing tools and planning your data organization strategy will minimize the amount of manual tweaking you’ll need to do later. The repositories provided by ATG Commerce are extensible so consider manipulating them if they don’t offer the properties or item types your product catalog requires.
Once you generate the export file(s), import your content into ATG Commerce using the ATG tool you prefer.
