Catalog Releases Overview

Use the Catalog View API to publish a catalog and to retrieve product information.

Publishing a catalog creates a release of that catalog that you can use in a storefront or other shopper experience. You can retrieve the hierarchies and the products associated with a catalog release. You can see which parent nodes a product is associated with. This is useful if want to improve how your shoppers search your store, for example.

note

Currently, published catalogs are limited to the current release and two releases prior to the current release.

If you defined catalog rules and you want to retrieve a published catalog for a particular channel or a user-defined tag, you must set the appropriate headers in the request:

• EP-Channel - The channel, such as website or mobile app. Corresponds to the channel attribute in a Rule object.
• EP-Context-Tag - A tag defined in the store, such as clearance. Corresponds to the tag attribute in a Rule object.

You can see the parent nodes a product is associated with in the breadcrumbs metadata for each product. This is useful if you want to improve how your shoppers search your store, for example. The breadcrumbs only show products associated with parent nodes. If your products are all in a hierarchy root node, no breadcrumbs metadata is generated.

An example of breadcrumbs metadata is shown below.

{
  "bread_crumbs": {
    "04e748f1-83db-4013-85c8-9edfb0e1b5fa": [
      "e5a64eae-56c2-48cd-b8b1-f5d3be734d52",
      "94b882fa-85de-470e-acb3-5b11358e02de"
    ],
    "a96a898b-444c-40b6-9c27-5fc74d08e685": [
      "e5a64eae-56c2-48cd-b8b1-f5d3be734d52"
    ]
  }
}

The following diagram illustrates how the parent nodes are listed in the breadcrumbs example above.

1. The product is in Node 2. The ID for Node 2 is shown first in the first set of breadcrumbs.
2. Node 2 is part of Hierarchy 1. The ID for Hierarchy 1 is shown second.
3. Node 1 is the parent node of Node 2. The ID for Node 1 is shown last.
4. The product is also in Node 3. The ID for Node 3 is shown first in the second set of breadcrumbs.
5. Node 3 is in the root of Hierarchy 1. The ID for Hierarchy 1 is shown last.

The Release object

Attribute	Type	Description
id	string	A unique identifier for the node.
type	string	The type of object being returned. Always: release.
attributes.name	string	The name of the release.
attributes.description	string	A description of the node, such as the name of a category.
attributes.published_at	string($date-time)	The date and time the release was published.
attributes.hierarchy_ids	[array]	An array of references to the hierarchies in the release.