1. Using Oracle Commerce
  2. Manage Your Catalog
  3. Edit catalog items without publishing

Edit catalog items without publishing

Direct catalog editing allows you to update your live catalog and web site without running through publishing steps.

This feature is not designed to be turned on and off. We recommend you choose the publishing strategy that makes sense for your business based on a number of factors, including how large your catalog is and its source, how often you will need to make changes to it (high frequency/volume of publishes), and the organization of your team.

By default, when you create or modify catalog items, the changes you make must be published before they take effect. However, you can optionally configure Commerce so that you can make changes to the following catalog items directly on the storefront without publishing:

  • Catalogs (not including catalog media)
  • Product types
  • Collections
  • Products and add-on products
  • SKU and SKU bundles

Publishing catalog changes works well for many merchants, particularly those that change their catalogs relatively infrequently. Some merchants, however, have a large number of products and update their catalogs frequently, in some cases updating them every day or multiple times a day. For these merchants, Commerce provides the ability to make catalog changes available on the storefront immediately, bypassing the publishing process.

Enabling the direct catalog editing feature means:

  • You can immediately display any changes without the need to publish.
  • You can directly push your entire catalog data to production by avoiding the publishing step. This is particularly useful when changes to products, collections, or SKUs occur frequently.
  • When direct catalog editing is enabled, your site’s URL patterns must use IDs to specify products and collections. Using URL slugs instead of IDs in URL patterns will cause errors. See Configure URL patterns for more information.
  • Search content updates run every 15 minutes to ensure the search index is up-to-date.

Consider direct catalog editing if you are getting catalog data from an external system, such as a supplier or a PIM, and passing that data through without requiring users to make changes to that catalog data; or if you frequently publish a large number of items or assets. You may also want to consider it if you are concerned about publishing times, which increase when changes affect a large number of assets, and/or when there is a high volume of product catalog changes.

You might also want to use direct editing if you are concerned about lockout, since during a publishing event, users cannot work with administration interface tools. This feature may also be helpful if you have distributed teams, with a number of individuals publishing throughout the day and/or from multiple time zones.

Direct catalog editing is not designed to be turned on and off, and as such, you should consider this process to be part of your environment. Because this feature is working with a live production site, you should carefully consider whether direct catalog editing is something that you want to enable.

Understand additional considerations when using direct catalog editing

Choosing to use direct catalog editing and bypassing the publishing process comes with some trade-offs, including:

  • You will not be able to preview any changes you make before they are in production.
  • Search indexing runs every fifteen minutes, which might result in a lag between when changes go live and when that changed is indexed and appears in any search or navigation results.
  • Product recommendations do not immediately reflect direct catalog edits. Instead, the recommendations service exports the catalog daily in order to generate product recommendations, which can mean that the products returned may be up to 24 hours old.

Important: Enabling direct catalog editing automatically enables direct price editing. For more information about direct price editing, see Update prices without publishing. (You can choose to use direct price editing on its own, even if you choose to use the default publishing process for catalog changes.)

Since direct catalog editing is not designed to be turned on and off, you should consider whether or not it makes sense to use this feature, ideally during your site implementation as you are thinking through your business processes. Because this feature is working with a live production site, you should carefully consider whether direct catalog editing is something that you want to enable.

Perform prerequisite checks

There are a few things that you should check before enabling and disabling direct catalog editing:

  • There are no items in the search indexing queue.
  • If your stores have any unpublished catalog or price changes, you must publish them before attempting to enable direct catalog editing. Additionally, make sure no imports or publishing events are happening while you are enabling direct catalog editing.
  • Your site's URL patterns are using IDs to specify products and collections.

Note that the updateDirectEditConfiguration endpoint will perform the necessary validations and return the appropriate errors.

Update your catalog without publishing

To update your catalog directly without publishing, enable direct catalog editing using the updateDirectEditConfiguration endpoint.

For example:

PUT /ccadmin/v1/merchant/directEdit/catalog
{
  "enable" : true
}

Use direct catalog editing

If you create or modify a catalog item when direct catalog editing is enabled, (using the administration interface, an endpoint, or an import process) the changes you make are available on the storefront without publishing; they do not appear in the list of changes that are returned by REST endpoints or appear in the Publishing page of the administration interface (although the data that is live on the site is reflected and editable in the administration interface tool elsewhere).

When you publish changes, Commerce initiates an indexing operation so the search index is updated to reflect the changes. However, with direct catalog editing, catalog items on the production server can be changed without publishing, which means catalog items in the index may become out of date. See Manage Search Settings for more information.

To ensure the index is kept up-to-date, enabling direct catalog editing enables a schedule that performs incremental indexing every 15 minutes. Performing a publishing operation does not trigger an index when direct catalog editing is enabled. However, if you have already used the setSearchPartialSchedule endpoint in the Search Data and Indexing API to set up a different incremental indexing schedule, that schedule will remain in place instead.

Note: When bulk import is running, you will notice that storefront performance is slower because bulk import requires continual purging and invalidation of the storefront cache. Refer to Perform Bulk Export and Import for additional information.

Disable direct catalog editing

Before disabling direct catalog edit, refer to Perform prerequisite checks for more information.

You can disable direct catalog editing by using the updateDirectEditConfiguration endpoint to set the enable property back to false. Doing so initiates a full publishing process.

It is worth noting, however, that you should decide which mode makes most sense for your store, and continue to use that mode unless your business needs change. The feature is not designed to be turned on and off frequently. Disabling direct catalog editing may cause a considerable delay, because Commerce must then synchronize your publishing server with the catalog on your production server.

After disabling direct catalog editing, direct price editing remains enabled, as does incremental indexing. If you then turn off direct price editing, incremental indexing is canceled.

However, if you used the setSearchPartialSchedule endpoint to create a different incremental indexing schedule, disabling catalog editing does not cancel that schedule unless you have set the parseString parameter to "* * * * * 0,15,30,45".

Understand scheduled site map generation

Site maps are generated nightly and direct catalog editing does not modify that behavior.

Note: All site maps are updated, even if your catalog updates only impact a small number of your overall site maps.