Thread: Dot Feed Suggestions/Questions

How is everyone testing their data? It would be helpful if in the future there was an option to set a range of items to bring in for testing purposes. Right now I have to wait for Google to fetch 15k items which might take 10 minutes of waiting each time I make a quick rule change. The other issue is that in the test feed for Google I need to purposely leave out an required attribute if I want to have access to downloading the full report as a csv file.

How else are people testing this? IE keeps giving me timeout issues and I have already following Microsoft's KB articles on increasing KeepAlive time. Firefox just crashes on me after about 5 minutes. I can sometimes get the data to pull into Chrome.

Are there any feed readers that might do the trick. I tried to register it through Google Reader just for fun, but that doesn't work.

I am wondering if I can set a rule to exclude all products from the feed and then a rule that overrides it to bring in just one product by it's ID. That would give me a round about way of setting a data range for testing quickly.


Another issue I am having is getting gender to set for my apparel items. I have a ticket into support for suggestions, but figure this won't hurt.

Here is what I sent so if anyone has gone through this and figured it out that would be great:

I am trying to get gender assigned to products without success. I have tried several mappings and none of them are doing the trick. There are a lot of products I need to do this with so I thought doing it based on the department (sectionID) would be the least amount of work for creating rules. One example is that I have a Haggar Flat Front Dress Pant Black 32 x 30 that is mapped in ASPDNSF to the following sections: Men's, Men's > Men's Jeans, Men's > Men's Jeans > Men's Dress Pants

My first attempt was at the root level of the men's department which has an id of 15. I added the rule "When SectionID matches 15 then set gender = Male ". The feed did not fill in gender at all. What I see is a self closed tag .

I have also tried:
"When SectionID matches 113 then set gender = Male " (id of Men's Jeans sub-section)
"When SectionID matches 116 then set gender = Male "(id of Men's Dress Pants sub-section)
"When ParentSectionID matches 15 then set gender = Male ".
"When ParentSectionID matches 113 then set gender = Male ".

My latest attempt was at just the section name: "When Section Name matches * Men's * then set gender = Male"

I also tried getting more complex with:
"When ProductID matches *
and
"When SectionID matches 15 then set gender = Male "

Here are some tips that I put in for my rules so far and might help other people. Nothing all that complex, but might save some people time.

My client uses the same MPN number at the main product level and in the variant product level. I was seeing output for MPN like MPN = 12341234 when it should have been MPN = 1234.

The rule I used to change this and still allow for unique variant MPN's is:
When Variant ManufacturerPartNumber matches * then set mpn = {original}

Another issue I ran across was that we might see a product named Haggar Jeans, but all its variants are generic like Black 30 x 32 or Black 30 x 34. The title showing up in Google was just "Black 30 x 32". Items for Google all need to have the common title as part of the name.

When Product Name matches * and
Variant Name matches * then set title = {original} {current}

The above rule creates: Haggar Jeans Black 30 x 32 as the title

These tips are very helpful, I hope my dotfeed will work at some point so I can use them.