This section provides information that helps you plan your export.

Asset Types Not Available for Export

Merchandising does not export the following types of assets:

Exporting Asset Properties

When you export an asset, you can export any of its properties that have the following data types:

For more information about property data types, see the chapters that describe creating and working with different asset types earlier in this guide.

For information about the properties you can export for prices, see Exporting Price Properties.

Asset Versioning

You do not have to add assets to a project to export them, but you do have to be working in the context of a project.

If you select an asset for export that you modified in your project, the modified version is exported. Otherwise, the main version—the version last checked in—is exported.

Note: Versioning information is not included in the export. If you plan to edit and re-import the spreadsheet to Merchandising, see Versioning Considerations.

Security

You must have Read and List access for assets and properties you want to export. You do not need Write access to export assets but you do need Write access to import changes to assets and properties. For more information about user permissions, contact your administrator or see Managing User Access and Security in the Content Administration Programming Guide.

Exporting in a Multisite Environment

In a multisite environment, each catalog asset is assigned the following properties:

Merchandising does not export either of these properties for catalog items, but does export the Sites property for promotions.

Export Size Limitations

Exporting Different Types of Assets

You can export only one type of asset in each export procedure. For example, you cannot export both products and categories to the same spreadsheet; you must export the products in one export procedure and then export the categories in another.

Some asset types are children of other asset types. For example, Configurable SKU is a type of SKU and Item Discount is a type of Promotion. If you choose to export a parent asset, all its child assets are automatically exported.

If you export both parent and child assets, only properties that apply to both asset types are available for export. For example, the One use per order property is not available for export when you select the Promotion asset type, but it is available when you select Shipping Discount.

Options for Exporting Collection Properties

You can export supported collection properties, such as lists, sets, and maps, in either of the following formats:

For instructions, see Exporting Asset Properties.

Items in map collections contain key/value pairs that map one thing to another. To represent these items, the key and the value are separated by an equals sign, for example, Alabama=AL,Alaska=AK.

Flat Format

In flat format, each row of the spreadsheet represents a single asset with all of its exported properties. This format allows you to export multiple properties for each asset. Individual values in a collection are separated by a comma, for example, blue,green,red, or a comma and a space if they are repository items, for example, cat110006, cat11008, cat11009.

The following table shows how the childSKUs collection property appears in flat format:

Note: If collection items contain only numbers, or contain a comma in a value, the items are enclosed in double quotation marks, for example, "123","124". This prevents Microsoft Excel from interpreting the list of numbers as a single number. If a value contains a comma, the double quotation mark indicates that the comma does not begin a new item. For example, a keyword collection could be exported as: winter accessories,"hats, scarves, and gloves",knitted gifts. The quotation marks are removed if you re-import the spreadsheet.

Itemized Format

In itemized format, collection items are separated into individual rows, so one asset might span several rows in the spreadsheet. If you choose to itemize a collection property, you can only select that one property for export.

The following table shows the products from the previous example with the childSKUs property in itemized format: