#Synchronize catalog structure: categories

#What do we synchronize?

#Synchronization steps

Collecting categories is a piece of cake: query the PIM, store the result.

GET /api/rest/v1/categories

{
      "items": [
        {
          "code": "winter_collection",
          "parent": null,
          "updated": "2021-05-21T11:32:00+02:00",
          "labels": {
            "en_US": "Winter collection",
            "fr_FR": "Collection hiver",
            "de_DE": "Winter-Kollektion"
          }
        }
      ]
    }
    

Store data you need into a category_list, like code and labels.

#Filtering categories

Filtering categories is another story.

Problem: with the previous call, you will collect all the categories of your PIM, even the ones you don’t use in the scope you are synchronizing! Maybe it’s not an issue — you don’t have so many categories after all. In this case, don’t go further in filtering.

If you need to filter your categories, you have two possibilities.

#Filter by category codes

If you know the category codes you want to collect, it’s your lucky day: a filter for this purpose exists.

GET /api/rest/v1/categories?search={"code":[{"operator":"IN","value":["category_code1","category_code2"]}]}

#Filter by category tree

Unfortunately, the most difficult filtering method is probably the one you need: because a scope has one and only one category tree, it’s natural to filter categories that belong to the category tree of the scope...and there is no API endpoint for that.

And who says “graph,” says “dept-first search”!

By combining the filter on the parent category and this well-known graph algorithm, you can collect all the categories of a given category tree.

function get_categories_of_a_category_tree(category_root)
    {
        store category_root in category_list
    	children = result of api call GET /api/rest/v1/categories?search={"parent":[{"operator":"=","value":"category_root"}]}
    	foreach children as child
            get_categories_of_a_category_tree(child)
    }
    

Categories have been synchronized! Now, let's deal with the main synchronization of this guide.