Catalog XML Structures

  • Article

The Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 Catalog Extensible Markup Language (XML) format is designed to represent product catalogs in a format suitable for exchange between applications and for transport over the Internet.

The format itself is defined in an XML data schema, allowing it to be used with XML data-aware tools such, as BizTalk Server mapping tools.

The Commerce Server 2002 Catalog XML format is intended to represent a large variety of product catalogs, and for this reason uses the notion of a "meta-schema." That is, the way that a certain product may be represented in the format itself is defined in a schema definition section. This schema definition section defines the types of attributes that the catalog (or rather, catalog collection) stores to describe both products and categories, and defines the attributes recorded against different types of products and categories.

The Commerce Server Catalog XML format does not propose any fixed representation of particular types of products, but provides a means by which almost any product description can be recorded in a rich form.

The format also allows for multiple catalogs to be represented in one XML file.

This section contains:

  • XML Structure. Shows the XML structure.
  • XML Elements. Describes the XML elements and their relations.
  • Import Semantics. Describes the semantics that apply when importing a Commerce Server Catalog XML file.
  • XDR Schema. Shows the XML Data-Reduced (XDR) schema used to define the XML elements, attributes, and relations.

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