Access:
Affiliate access, no authentication required.
Frequency limitation(s): 3600 request(s) per hour. 5000 request(s) per day.
Description:
This module retrieves taxonomy information for all products in one or more R datafeeds. Taxonomy can be either categorization information (e.g. "Category" -> "SubCategory" -> "Product Group") or brand name information.
To see this module in use, consider the following examples:
- list of categorization information for all Altrec.com datafeeds
- list of brand names for all Altrec.com datafeeds
Note that when using XML output, there are two different formats (controlled by the "taxonomy_format" option) that may be utilized:
- the default version using only node names, click for an example
- a "nested" version which utilizes nodes and attributes to produce a more compact XML schema, listing product groups within subcategories, subcategories within categories, etc. click for an example
When using categorization taxonomy information from this module in other API modules (as for filter criteria in the ProductSearch API, for instance) please be aware of a naming convention mis-match between the two modules. Most AvantLink product datafeed functionality, including the ProductTaxonomy module, utilizes three levels of categorization as described by:
"Category" -> "SubCategory" -> "Product Group"
However, some legacy systems, such as the ProductSearch API, were constructed using alternate naming for those three levels, i.e.:
"Department" -> "Category" -> "SubCategory"
While this is not ideal, in order to avoid interfering with any external Affiliate applications we have chosen not to update those legacy systems to use consistent naming conventions. To summarize how data can be migrated from the ProductTaxonomy module to the ProductSearch API module, use the following:
- ProductTaxonomy.Category = ProductSearch.Department
- ProductTaxonomy.SubCategory = ProductSearch.Category
- ProductTaxonomy.Product Group = ProductSearch.SubCategory
Supported Output Formats:
- csv
- tab
- xml
Parameters:
- affiliate_id
- Type: integer
- Required: true
- Description: An AvantLink assigned Affiliate identifier.
- module
- Type: string
- Required: true
- Description: For this module, specify "ProductTaxonomy".
- datafeed_id
- Type: integer
- Required: false
- Description: An AvantLink assigned Merchant datafeed identifier, i.e. which datafeed to return taxonomy data for.
- merchant_id
- Type: integer
- Required: false
- Description: An AvantLink assigned Merchant identifier.
- output
- Type: string
- Required: false
- Description: The specific output format you wish to receive results in. Possible values include: csv (comma-separated text), html, js (javascript document.write statements), rss, tab (tab-delimited text), and xml (the default). Individual modules may not support all output methods.
- taxonomy_format
- Type: string
- Required: false
- Description: For XML output only, specifying a value of "nested" will change the schema of the returned data.
- taxonomy_type
- Type: string
- Required: false
- Description: What type of taxonomy to retrieve; must be one of "categories" (used by default if no value or an invalid value is specified) or "brands".