Stage 2: Import list content into the Product Catalog Site Collection

This is a blog post in the series "How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013."  In this series, I'll use data from a fictitious company called "Contoso" to show you how to use search features to set up a website based on product catalog data.
Note: Most of the features described in this series are not available in SharePoint 2013 Online.

For an overview of the blog posts in this series, go to How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013.

 

Start stage 2

Once you've set up your Product Catalog Site Collection, as described in Stage 1: Create site collections for cross-site publishing, we'll import content into this site collection. To do this, we'll use PowerShell scripts. Before we start, let's take a look at what's automatically created in a Product Catalog Site Collection.

In our newly created Product Catalog Site Collection, you can see a default list template named Products.

Products list

The Products list contains a managed metadata site column named Item Category.

Item Category site column The Item Category site column is associated with the term set named Product Hierarchy.

Product hierarchy term set

To import list content into the Product list, we'll use PowerShell scripts that will:

  • Add content to the Products list.
  • Add terms to the Product Hierarchy term set.
  • Associate each item in the Products list with the correct term from the Product Hierarchy term set, and display this in the Item Category column in the Products list.

 

Before we can run the PowerShell scripts, we'll need to prepare the following:

  • A list of the site columns we want to add to the Products list.
  • A tab delimited text file containing the content you want to add to the Products list.
  • A tab delimited text file containing the taxonomy to be added to the Product Hierarchy term set.

 

The PowerShell scripts, instructions on how to create the tab delimited text files, and how to modify and use the import scripts so that it fits your catalog data can be found on the TechNet Gallery.

 

Once we've run the five PowerShell scripts, we get the following:

  • List content in the Products list. In our scenario, each list item is a product that Contoso is offering and want to display on their website.
  • Terms in the Product Hierarchy term set. In our scenario, the term set reflects how Contoso have categorized their products, for example one category is called "Laptops", another one's "MP3" players, etc.
  • In the Products list, content in the Item Category column is associated with the correct term from the Product Hierarchy term set. The screenshot below shows how the list item Southridge Video Laptop15.4W M1548  is associated with the term Laptops through the Item Category column.

Connection between an item and a term

 

So, now that we have content in the Products list, the next step is to enable this list as a catalog.

 

 

Next blog article in this series Stage 3: How to enable a list as a catalog

 

Additional resources