There are several ways to populate your catalog with assets. The first time you use ATG Merchandising, it’s likely you’ll import catalog content from a legacy system into ATG, following the process specific to your system configuration. For guidelines, see the Importing Product Catalog Content section of the ATG Commerce Catalog Administration chapter of the ATG Commerce Guide to Setting Up a Store. Then, you can create new assets manually as needed.
If you want one asset to appear identically in several parts of your catalog, you can link that asset to each location. Such assets have multiple parents: one parent for each location. When you make a change to the asset in one place, that change is reflected in all places.
Alternatively, you may want new assets that appear similar to existing assets, but have some different property values. In this case, duplicate the assets you want copies of and modify the property values as needed. Although the duplicated asset is independent of the original, assets contained by it are links. For example, a duplicated category is distinct from the original, but the products it contains link to the original products.
By unlinking an asset, you remove it from a location and if it only existed in one location, it is turned into an orphan. Orphan assets are assets, such as products and SKUs, that require parents, but can exist outside of the catalog hierarchy temporarily. While an asset is an orphan, it isn’t visible in the catalog hierarchy on a published Web site. You can move orphan assets back to the catalog or you can delete them.
Because the order of the assets on your Web site is identical to that of your catalog tree, you may need to adjust the tree structure by moving assets around and removing the ones you don’t want to use. Other ancillary assets, such as media assets and pricelists, may require re-arranging in order to improve visibility.
The capabilities provided to the assets that display in your catalog, such as products and categories, are similar to those provided to the ancillary assets, such as media assets, media folders, promotions, price lists, and facets. You can create original assets of these types, or duplicate existing assets as well as re-organize them. However, assets that exist in views other Catalog view have different parent requirements, so they can’t be orphans. For such assets, linking and unlinking capabilities often aren’t applicable.
Once you have finished your ATG Merchandising task, you signal that it is complete by selecting a task action. See Advancing from One Task to Another for instructions.
This chapter covers the following topics:
