Category Sharing

Category sharing allows the reuse of categories or a category hierarchy across catalogs. For example, if you were to create spring and fall product catalogs, many of your products would probably appear both catalogs.

The products that are in both catalogs could be assigned to one or more categories that could be shared between the catalogs. Categories can be shared across multiple catalogs, allowing catalog content to be reused and saving the work needed to maintain multiple copies of the categories. In the case of category sharing by reference, the category structure in the source catalog can be different than the structure in the native catalog.

Categories can be shared using sharing by reference.

Sharing by Reference

Sharing by reference means adding a category by reference into the catalog. Sharing by reference allows a category and the items assigned to that category to be added to one or more catalogs. If the category is a parent category, the complete hierarchy for that category is shared. The shared categories and assigned items are read-only in the catalogs where they are added. During the creation of the catalog, sharing can be enabled by specifying a source catalog that will be used for sharing by reference and setting the value of the sharing content to control what content will be shared from the source catalog. The advantage of using sharing by reference is that source catalog content can be shared to multiple catalogs and maintained in a single place, the source catalog. In addition, the referenced content can consist of more than one category. For example, a complete category hierarchy and any items assigned to categories in shared content can also be referenced within the catalog.

In the Category Hierarchy tab in a catalog, each category in the hierarchy is represented by a row in a collapsible table. The style of icon next to a category's name indicates how it is shared. Directly shared categories are marked with a folder icon; categories shared by reference are marked with the icon used for the Share Categories control. Categories that are shared by reference are only editable in the source catalog, and the categories and items are read-only in the target catalog where they are shared. A category or a complete category hierarchy, including items assignment, can be shared by reference.