Each catalog, category, product, and SKU in the Catalog Repository has one or more site IDs assigned to it to indicate which sites the item is affiliated with. When you associate a site with a catalog, you are assigning that site’s ID to the catalog. You can create these associations in two ways:
By assigning a default catalog to a site in Site Administration.
By assigning a catalog to a site in Merchandising.
After you associate a catalog with a site, two services manage cascading the catalog’s site IDs down to its constituent categories, products, and SKUs:
In the CA environment,
CatalogCompletionServicekeeps site IDs updated for catalog folders, catalogs, and categories as you work with your catalogs in Merchandising. Site IDs for products and SKUs are derived in this environment and mirror the site IDs for the parent categories of the products and SKUs.During deployment, the site IDs for catalog folders, catalogs, and categories are pushed to the production environment and then
CatalogMaintenanceServiceis automatically run to calculate the site IDs for products and SKUs, based on their parent categories, and store them as database-backed values.
Once you have created a site and associated one or more catalogs with it, you use Merchandising to populate and organize the catalogs. Note that, for catalogs that are associated with more than one site, changes made for one site will be reflected in the catalogs for the others. One of the catalogs you create can be specified as the default catalog for the site, described below.
Note: See the ATG Commerce Programming Guide for more information on the CatalogCompletiontService and CatalogMaintenanceService.
