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 ATG Content Administration 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 convert the derived site IDs for products and SKUs into database-backed values.
Note: CatalogCompletionService is a dynamic, running process that keeps catalog properties up to date in real time as you work in Merchandising. CatalogMaintenanceService is a batch process that converts the dynamically generated properties into database-backed values for performance reasons. See the ATG Commerce Programming Guide for more information on these two services.
