Catalog Name and Size Restrictions

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This topic lists the name and size restrictions for catalogs at the Commerce Server Business Desk level and the Catalog application programming interface (API) level. For information about values you can use for unique identifiers, see Best Practices for Catalogs.

Business Desk and Catalog API

Product Catalog Data Import DTS Task Restrictions

Scale Points for Product Catalogs

User-defined Property and Catalog Attributes

This section lists the name and size restrictions for catalogs at the Commerce Server Business Desk level and the Catalog application programming interface (API) level.

Business Desk and Catalog API

The following character restrictions apply for the indicated properties:

Item Name and size restrictions
Property Definition Name
  • A property definition name can be up to 100 characters long.
  • A numeral is not allowed in the first position.
  • Do not use the characters "," (a comma) or "." (a period).

  • Do not use characters that are not accepted in an XML tag name. For a list of resources on XML, see:

    https://msdn.microsoft.com/xml

  • Do not use "ProductID" or "VariantID" in property definition names.
Product Definition Name A product definition name can be up to 128 characters long.
Category Definition Name A category definition name can be up to 128 characters long.
Catalog Name (internal name, not the one displayed on your Web site)
  • The name must be unique.
  • A catalog name can be up to 85 characters long.
  • Do not use the characters "[", "]" (brackets), ' (apostrophe), "(", ")" (parentheses), or "#." Do not use commas or periods.
  • There are no restrictions to the catalog display name.
  • If you have two or more Commerce Server sites with separate databases in which catalog data is stored, and the sites are sharing the same Data Warehouse, do not give the same name to the different catalogs for the two different sites. If two catalogs have the same name, the Data Warehouse treats them as one catalog.
Category Name
  • The name must be unique.
  • Do not use the characters "/," (slash) "," (comma) or "(quotation mark). Do not use commas.
  • Do not use a name that is more than 100 characters.
Product Name
  • The maximum length of the product name depends on the value specified in the product definition. Commerce Server does not limit the length.
  • For each product, use a unique name.
  • Verify that none of your category and product name combinations are repeated.
    • If you create a catalog for a site, and you have non-unique product names within categories, the wrong product may be added to the shopping basket when the user selects a product for purchase. This occurs because the product name is appended to the category name. For example, product 1A in category B and product A in category B1 are both stored as "B1A."
Product ID
  • Use an integer or text.
  • Do not use date/time or a currency.
  • Do not use quotation marks.
Variant ID
  • Do not use quotation marks.

Product Catalog Data Import DTS Task Restrictions

If you are importing catalog data into the Data Warehouse, do not create catalog properties that contain special characters. Special characters cause the Product catalog data import DTS task to fail. For example, catalog properties should not include the following characters: '!', '"', '%', '&', '(', ')', '*', '+', ',', '-', '.', '/', ':', ';', '<', '=', '>', '?', '\\', ']', '^', '`', '{', '|', '}', '~'. They should not contain any control characters, for example, 0x00 /* NULL */, 0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05, 0x06, 0x07 /* , CONTROL-G <BEL> */, 0x08 /* CONTROL-H <BS> */, 0x09 /* CONTROL-I <HT> */, 0x0a /* CONTROL-J <LF> */, 0x0b /* CONTROL-K <VT> */, x0c /* CONTROL-J <FF> */, 0x0d /* CONTROL-M <PRS_CR> */, 0x0e /* , CONTROL-N <SO> */, 0x0f /* CONTROL-O <SI> */, 1x10, 0x11, 0x12, and so on.

Scale Points for Product Catalogs

Commerce Server supports a practical limit of 10,000 base catalogs or 10,000 virtual catalogs, or a combination of the two. There is no hardcoded limit.

In Commerce Server 2002, a new parameter in the ImportXML method allows you to import the catalogs without creating the full text catalogs.

The following table lists additional scale points for Commerce Server catalogs.

Item Size or number supported
Number of catalogs 10,000 base catalogs or 10,000 virtual catalogs

Or, you can use a combination of both base and virtual catalogs.
Number of products per catalog Five million

Ee824136.note(en-US,CS.20).gif Note

  • Commerce Server has not been tested with 10,000 catalogs each containing five million products.
Number of property definitions per catalog 1,000
Number of base catalogs per virtual catalog 80
Number of products per virtual catalog One million
Number of price rules per virtual catalog 10,000
Number of products per category 10,000
Number of nested categories Five

In addition, Commerce Server supports the SQL text data type, which is not subject to the Microsoft SQL Server row size limit of 8,060 bytes. Multiple product catalogs can share a single SQL Server full-text catalog.

User-defined Property and Catalog Attributes

The maximum number of user-defined property and catalog attributes is 100. Commerce Server 2002 allows you to define additional attributes to associate user-specific information with properties and catalogs. For example, you can create a user-defined catalog attribute to associate vendor information with a catalog.

You can use the AddPropertyAttribute and AddCatalogAttribute methods of the CatalogManager object to add property and catalog attributes. The following character restrictions apply for the indicated properties.

Item Name and size restrictions
CatalogProperty
  • There is no numeric limit.
  • The maximum number of Catalog Properties that can be used in any one catalog is 1000. (SQL Server has a limit of 1024 columns in any table.)
  • These properties are also the names of the columns in the per-catalog tables.
PropertyAttribute
  • The maximum number of user-defined Property Attributes that can be added to the Product Catalog System is 100. These are not related to the CatalogProducts table.
  • These properties are the additional user-defined columns in the CatalogAttributes table.
CatalogAttribute
  • The maximum number of user-defined Catalog Attributes that can be added to the Product Catalog System is 100. These are not related to the CatalogProducts table.

See Also

Best Practices for Catalogs

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