Creating Active Data Feeds
When active data is enabled for your site, certain data, as defined by Business Manager system objects, is captured on your Production instance. These data are automatically imported into your Production and Staging instances.
To use this data on your Sandbox instance, download the data (.csv format) from the Production instance and import it into your Sandbox instance. You can also obtain the csv file directly via WebDAV from the impex directory on your Production instance.
If you want to use this data for extra analysis or reporting outside Salesforce B2C Commerce, you can export it.
The captured data is defined in the CustomerActiveData and ProductActiveData system objects. Most the attributes for these system objects are used in the following automatic feeds by B2C Commerce's Merchandising Analytics process:
- B2C Commerce Product Active Data
- B2C Commerce Product Weekly Active Data
- B2C Commerce Customer Active Data
- B2C Commerce Customer Weekly Active Data
Some of the attributes of these system objects, however, are not used in any feed. If you want to use these attributes, as shown in the following table, you must create feeds for them.
| System object | Attribute |
|---|---|
| CustomerActiveData |
Customer.returnItems returnValue returns |
| ProductActiveData |
availableDate costPrice returnRate |
If you create other custom active data attributes, you must feed them in as well.
See Creating Custom Attributes for Active Merchandising. For example, create different feeds when for attributes that must be imported with a different frequency (daily versus weekly) or are fed from different backend systems.
Unlike with B2C Commerce import/export files, active merchandising feeds don't have a set schema. Instead, you start by defining the feed format in Business Manager, which can then be imported or exported into any other instance using Site Import/Export.
Next, import the feeds for data analysis. You can also automate the active data feed import.