Add a Catalog source

This is for:

System Administrator

The first step in indexing your content is to create a Catalog source that will hold all your catalog data in the Coveo index.

A Catalog source contains items designed to be sold. It can also contain variants, availability channels, or entitlement information.

Note

Coveo also offers solutions to index content residing in SAP Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

See the following sections for instructions:

It’s also possible to index commerce-specific content using a Salesforce, REST API, Database, or GraphQL API source. However, additional setup is required. Contact your Customer Success Manager to discuss your options.

It’s recommended to create separate product sources for each locale you’re supporting (variations in country, languages, and currency)[1].

This allows the Coveo ML models to learn independently from each experience. Such a setup will result in recommendations that are optimally personalized to users' preferences and search behavior on each website in your multi-catalog structure.

Example

The company Barca sells products in Canada and the US. In Canada, they support French and English. In the US, they support English and Spanish.

They have the following storefronts:

  • Barca Canada (www.barca.com/ca/). This storefront supports French (www.barca.com/ca/fr/) and English (www.barca.com/ca/en/).

  • Barca US (www.barca.com/us/). This storefront supports English (www.barca.com/us/en/) and Spanish (www.barca.com/us/es/).

This setup requires the creation of four product sources:

  • One for the English variation of the Canadian storefront.

  • One for the French variation of the Canadian storefront.

  • One for the English variation of the US storefront.

  • One for the Spanish variation of the US storefront.

Note

Some setups require an additional source to index items of the availability catalog object. See Source configuration approaches for availability channel for details.

1. Having a separate source for each locale you’re supporting will likely lead to content duplication. This could affect your product entitlements.

Add a Catalog source

Follow the instructions below to add a Catalog source.

  1. On the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, click Add source.

  2. In the Add a source of content panel, click the Catalog source tile.

  3. Configure your source.

Tip
Leading practice

It’s best to create or edit your source in your sandbox organization first. Once you’ve confirmed that it indexes the desired content, you can copy your source configuration to your production organization, either with a snapshot or manually.

See About non-production organizations for more information and best practices regarding sandbox organizations.

"Configuration" tab

In the Add a Catalog Source panel, the Configuration tab is selected by default. It contains your source’s general and authentication information, as well as other parameters.

General information

Source name

Enter a name for your source.

Tip
Leading practice

A source name can’t be modified once it’s saved, therefore be sure to use a short and descriptive name, using letters, numbers, hyphens (-), and underscores (_). Avoid spaces and other special characters.

When coding a crawler to push content in this source, a developer will need this name to get the corresponding sourceId.

Stream API URL

Available only when accessing an existing Catalog source, the input contains the URL you must use to stream your catalog data in your source. The URL has the following form:

https://api.cloud.coveo.com/push/v1/organizations/<ORGANIZATION_ID>/sources/<SOURCE_ID>/stream/open

The URL that you can Copy to clipboard contains your <ORGANIZATION_ID> and <SOURCE_ID>, which are required parameters to stream your catalog data in your source. See the Stream section in Push API to test API calls.

API key

When creating a Catalog source, you have the option to select the Create an API key checkbox:

API key checkbox in source configuration panel | Coveo

Once you’re done configuring your source, this option creates an API key with the privileges required to send information to the source. You can then use the value of this API key to authorize the requests required to stream and update your catalog data.

Notes

  • This option isn’t visible if you don’t have the Edit API keys privilege.

  • You can access the API key configuration in the API Keys (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page of the Coveo Administration Console. The API key has the <source name> API key name, where <source name> is the name of the source you created.
Important

The Your API Key dialog appears only once and is the only place where you can see and copy the key value.

If you fail to copy the key value, the workaround is to manually create a new API key as follows:

  • Select the Custom access level for the Sources privileges of the Content service. Then, in the dropdown of available sources, select Edit access level for the targeted source and View access level for the other sources.

  • Select the View access level for the Organization privileges of the Organization service.

In this case, you should also disable or delete the original unused API key.
Project

If you have the Enterprise edition, use the Project selector to associate your source with one or multiple Coveo projects.

"Content Security" tab

Select who will be able to access the source items through a Coveo-powered search interface. For details on this parameter, see Content security.

Note

If you make your source secure by selecting the Same users and groups as in your current permission system content security option, your crawler process must push item permissions along with the content (see Manage security identities in a security identity provider and Manage items and permissions in a Push source).

"Access" tab

In the Access tab, specify whether each group (and API key, if applicable) in your Coveo organization can view or edit the current source.

For example, when creating a new source, you could decide that members of Group A can edit its configuration, while Group B can only view it.

For more information, see Custom access level.

Required privileges

You can assign privileges to allow access to specific tools in the Coveo Administration Console. The following table indicates the privileges required to view or edit elements of the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page and associated panels. See Manage privileges and Privilege reference for more information.

Note

The Edit all privilege isn’t required to create sources. When granting privileges for the Sources domain, you can grant a group or API key the View all or Custom access level, instead of Edit all, and then select the Can Create checkbox to allow users to create sources. See Can Create ability dependence for more information.
Actions Service Domain Required access level

View sources, view source update schedules, and subscribe to source notifications

Content

Fields

View

Sources

Organization

Organization

Edit sources, edit source update schedules, and edit source mappings

Organization

Organization

View

Content

Fields

Edit

Sources

View and map metadata

Content

Source metadata

View

Fields

Organization

Organization

Content

Sources

Edit

What’s next?

Now that you’ve created your Catalog source, you should make sure that your Coveo organization contains all the required fields. Proceed to Commerce fields for more information.