Create a Catalog source

This is for:

System Administrator

The first step to index your content is to create a Catalog source that will hold all your products into the Coveo index.

A Coveo commerce catalog contains SKUs designed to be sold. Most catalogs contain products, variants, stores, or entitlement information. The Catalog source is the recommended approach for most commerce catalogs.

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.

Prerequisites

Before you create your Catalog source:

  • Enable Coveo for Commerce in your organization by contacting Coveo Sales, if not already done.

  • Ensure that your data contains SKUs that are unique. For example, if your catalog contains products that have French and English names or descriptions that use the same SKUs, you would need to create a Catalog source for each language to avoid the duplication of SKUs in the same commerce catalog. If your commerce catalog applies to many countries or regions, sells the same products under a single language, and is managed by a single merchandising team, you would only need to create a single Catalog source.

    Note

    There’s a 1:1 relationship between your commerce catalog and the product source, meaning your product source can only be used in one commerce catalog.

Add or edit a Catalog source

When adding or editing a Catalog source, follow the following instructions.

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/Edit 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.

  • Make sure to copy the value of the API key before closing the source configuration panel as you won’t be able to retrieve it later.

  • 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.

"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 select Same users and groups as in your content system, 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, set 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.

See Custom access level for more information.

Completion

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 (or lose) the key value, the workaround is to manually create a new API key. In the Privileges tab, under the Content service, for the Sources privileges, locate your source name. Then, select View from the dropdown list in the Access Level column. Furthermore, under the Organization service, for the Organization privileges, select View from the dropdown list in the Access Level column. In this case, you should also disable or delete the original unused API key.

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 view the View Metadata subpage

Content

Fields

Edit

Sources

Content

Source metadata

View

Organization

Organization

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.