Importing pricing data from Dynamic Pricing to HCL Commerce

Set up an SFTP transport and scheduled job to import the latest pricing data from Dynamic Pricing to HCL Commerce.

Before you begin

About this task

After merchandisers use Dynamic Pricing to adjust product prices according to their business strategy, the updated pricing data can be imported to HCL Commerce.

In a production environment, this scheduled job is configured on the staging or authoring environment. Imported pricing data must then be propagated from the staging environment to the production environment before updated pricing can appear on the live storefront.

Procedure

  1. Configure the Dynamic Pricing SFTP transport.
    1. Open the Administration Console.
    2. On the Administration Console Site/Store Selection page, select Site.
    3. Click Configuration > Transport. The Transport Configuration page displays.
    4. Click Add to open the Add Transport page.
    5. Select the Dynamic Pricing SFTP Import connection settings check box.
    6. Click Add to accept the changes. When you add a transport method to a site, it is automatically activated.
    7. From the Add Transport page, click the check box beside Dynamic Pricing SFTP Import connection settings, and click Configure.
    8. Specify the following configuration parameters for the SFTP transport, and click Ok.
      Parameter Value
      Host name Enter the FTP host name.
      Port number Enter the port number. By default port for Dynamic Pricing is 160.
      User name Enter your FTP user name.
      Password Enter your FTP password.
      Remote directory Enter remote FTP upload directory.
  2. Configure the scheduled job to import prices from Dynamic Pricing to HCL Commerce
    1. Click Configuration > Scheduler. A list of jobs that are scheduled to run is displayed.
    2. On the Scheduler Status Display page, click New.
    3. Create the Dynamic Pricing import job with the following values:
      Parameter Value
      Job Command Dataload
      Job parameters Enter the following job parameters:
      dataLoadType
      Use DynamicPricingImport for the type of Dataload command.
      LoadOrder
      Indicates the order in which the data is to be imported. Use the value OfferPrice to import offer prices.
      deleteRemoteFiles
      Indicates whether to delete the remote Dynamic Pricing files after they are imported to HCL Commerce.
      True
      Deletes the remote files.
      False
      Does not delete the remote files. This parameter is recommended for this integration.
      getFileNameContains
      Optional: Retrieves files based on a specified value. For example, getFileNameContains=prices, retrieves files that contain "prices" in the file name.
      Start date Enter the current date.
      Start time Enter a time that you want to start the job for the first time.
      Schedule interval Type the number of seconds between successive runs of this job. If this parameter is omitted, the job runs only 1 time. A typical schedule interval for this job is 300 seconds (5 minutes).
    4. Click OK.
    An example of a Dynamic Pricing import job is as follows:
    dataLoadType=DynamicPricingImport&deleteRemoteFiles=false&LoadOrder=OfferPrice

Results

When the scheduled job runs, the processed data from Dynamic Pricing is imported to HCL Commerce.

What to do next

  • If you imported the updated pricing data into your staging environment, and not your live production server, you must propagate the updated data from staging to production by using the stagingprop utility. For more information about the utility, see Stagingprop utility.
  • The updated product prices appear on your storefront after the completion of the next updateSearchIndex scheduled job. From the Administration console, you can verify or update the frequency at which this job is configured to run. For more information about updating your search index, see Creating and scheduling the UpdateSearchIndex job.