Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce overview

Summary

Connector overview

Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce is a module for Adobe Commerce. The connector is therefore installed on Adobe Commerce side and communicates with Akeneo PIM via its API.

The connector is an unidirectional system: it imports PIM data to Adobe Commerce. No Adobe Commerce (Magento) data is sent back to the PIM.

The PIM is considered as the master tool for product data, it should not be handled in Adobe Commerce.

Growth Edition Compatibility

The Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce is compatible with our Akeneo PIM Growth Edition. As you know some features managed by the Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce are not included in the Growth Edition:

  • Reference entities
  • Asset manager
  • User Rights

We will do our best to deactivate the errors generated in the logs, due to API calls related to those features, but be sure that your full/differential import will be successful.

 

Process overview

Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce is composed by 5 main jobs (5 main processes):

  1. Category
  2. Family
  3. Attribute
  4. Option
  5. Product

The Product Model and the Family Variant import processes has been removed since the 101.0.0 version of the Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce, and are handled by the Product job

 

Each job can be triggered manually or automatically on its own.

Each job is responsible for importing PIM architecture and data into Adobe Commerce. The jobs order above should be observed to build your catalog properly. You could skip steps, but please be careful if you do. For example, if you want to import attribute options and you have created new attributes in your PIM, you will first need to import attributes or it will result in an error. Please check your data before importing it!

 

Technical information: Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce inserts all PIM data into a temporary table. Then, data is manipulated (mapping,...) within this temporary table in SQL. Finally, the modified content is directly inserted into SQL in Adobe Commerce tables.

Even if raw SQL insertion is not the way you usually import data into a system, it is still faster than anything else, especially with the volume of data within a full Akeneo catalog. This results in a significant time saving for your imports.

 

As Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce is using SQL insertion, it will not trigger any of the events related to the entities imported. For example, plugins or observers located at product save will not be triggered during the import process.

 

You will find below the technical details for each process:

Category import process

  1. Create a temporary table
  2. Insert data into the temporary table
  3. Match the PIM code with the entity
  4. Create a URL key
  5. Exclude category trees from connector configuration
  6. Create a position
  7. Create some category entities
  8. Set a value for the attribute
  9. Count of child categories
  10. Update URL keys
  11. Drop the temporary table
  12. Clean the cache

Family import process

  1. Create temporary table
  2. Insert data into the temporary table
  3. Match the PIM code with the entity
  4. Create some families
  5. Create family attribute relations
  6. Init default groups
  7. Drop the temporary table
  8. Clean the cache

Attribute import process

  1. Create a temporary table
  2. Insert data into the temporary table
  3. Match the PIM code with the entity
  4. Match attribute types
  5. Match the family
  6. Add some attributes
  7. Drop the temporary table
  8. Clean the cache

Option import process

  1. Create temporary table
  2. Insert data into the temporary table
  3. Match the PIM code with the entity
  4. Insert options
  5. Insert options label
  6. Drop the temporary table
  7. Clean the cache

Product Model import process

The Product Model import process has been removed since the 101.0.0 version of the Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce, and is handled by the Product job

 
  1. Create a temporary table
  2. Create temporary reference attribute options table
  3. Create temporary reference entity records table
  4. Insert data into the temporary table
  5. Remove columns from product model table
  6. Add new columns to product model table
  7. Insert product models data into product model table

In a Growth Edition use context, step 3 will generate a red warning in the log console due to a non-relevant API end-point call. We will do our best to change that behavior as soon as possible. However, we guarantee you that even with this error, your full/differential import process will be successful.

 

Family Variant import process

The Family Variant import process has been removed since the 101.0.0 version of the Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce, and is handled by the Product job

  1. Create a temporary table
  2. Insert data into the temporary table
  3. Update axis column in the product model table
  4. Update product model data from variants data
  5. Clean the cache

Product import process

Since the 100.5.4 version of the Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce (the 100.4.6 version for the the Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce Community Edition), the product import process is importing the products family after family.

 

Since the 101.0.0 version of the Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce, the product import process is importing both the products and the product models family after family.

 
  1. Create a temporary table
  2. Create temporary reference attribute options table
  3. Create temporary reference entity records table
  4. Insert data into the temporary table
  5. Product Model Import
  6. Family Variant Import
  7. Add product required data
  8. Create configurable products
  9. Create Options for Variant Metrics Attributes
  10. Match the PIM code with the entity
  11. Update the family
  12. Update column values for options
  13. Create product entities
  14. Import file attributes
  15. Import asset file attribute
  16. Set values to attributes
  17. Update configurable products relation
  18. Update simple products relation
  19. Set products to websites
  20. Set products to categories
  21. Init stock
  22. Update related, up-sell and cross-sell products
  23. Set URL rewrites
  24. Import image attributes
  25. Import asset attributes
  26. Drop the temporary table
  27. Clean the media folder
  28. Clean the cache

In a Growth Edition use context, steps 3 & 25 will generate a red warning in the log console due to a non-relevant API end-point call. We will do our best to change that behavior as soon as possible. However, we guarantee you that even with this error, your full/differential import process will be successful.

 

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