Generating a file that captures your catalog hierarchy

For the classification of products and contents, IBM Digital Analytics, formerly known as Coremetrics Analytics requires a Category Definition File (CDF). This file needs to be sent to IBM Digital Analytics before pages are tagged. IBM Digital Analytics provides a command-line utility that an administrator can launch to generate the product data as a text file.

A CDF file is a text file that defines the category tree of the product catalog and page content. The CDF file captures this data as a CSV (comma-separated value) file with four columns - Coremetrics Client ID, Category ID, Category Name, and Parent Category ID.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to the appropriate folder:
    • LinuxAIXWindowsFor IBM i OS operating systemWC_installdir/bin/
    • WebSphere Commerce DeveloperWCDE_installdir/bin/
  2. Run the CDFGenerator utility.
  3. Locate the output file. This file is either in the /bin/ directory from which you launched the utility, or in a directory that is specified as part of the utility's command.
    Note: If you need to capture page content information, you must manually append the generated output file with this data. For more information, see the implementation guide for IBM Digital Analytics.
  4. Send the output file to IBM Digital Analytics. For more information, implementation guide for IBM Digital Analytics.
    Note: If the catalogid value you specify is for a sales catalog, there might be more than one record in the CDF file with the same category ID. In a sales catalog, a unique category ID can have multiple parent categories, as shown in the last two lines of this CDF file excerpt:
    99999999,101,MENS, 
99999999,102,SALE, 
99999999,123,MENS SALE,101 
99999999,123,MENS SALE,102

    In the CDF file, however, a unique category ID can have only one parent category. When you upload a CDF file that contains records with duplicate category IDs, will issue warnings and reject the additional duplicate records. You have three options:

    • Ignore the warnings from ; the additional duplicate records will be rejected by automatically.
    • Remove the additional duplicate records manually from the CDF file before uploading.
    • Consult for other implementation alternatives.