One of the most challenging parts of Magento 2 development is how new it is, and how abruptly it hit the market. There were beta versions, and talk of it being released, but I think the general feel from the community was it was never going to happen. Everyone (mostly) continued focusing on 1.x. This was the inspiration of my tutorial posts.

I’ve come to figure out that sending over multiple products and categories does NOT work. When you do that, you end up with only the last one being created/updated. I’m still researching if this is even possible, and have even reached out to the community, but with no luck.

I have omitted the multiple product/category send paragraphs from my previous posts. I really want to apologize for this. It was an unfortunate oversight.

When I figure this out, or find a better solution (such as extending Magento or something), I will most likely make that another “Part” of this tutorial series. In fact, if anyone solves this, please comment, or send me a link to a post and I’ll give you a write up, credit, and link (I won’t steal content).

We’re running into a holiday weekend, I’ll have Part 5 next week!

-Dan

One of the things I found to be a challenge was creating over 200 categories. The company I work for has a lot of different brands, categories, and a very large sku catalog. I didn’t want to farm this out and take money away from development, so I decided to do it myself. After assembling my CSV, I was ready to go to work with the Category REST API.

Updating your products is about the same process as creating them. You’re going to utilize the same API (/rest/V1/products).

The way we approach putting products up on our web site is to stock everything with a qty 0, and then the current price for the day its pushed over to the web site. From there our sales and marketing team will do daily updates of the current pricing and send over an update thru the REST API. Additionally, we have a cron setup that pulls inventory files and updates qty levels every few hours. This is where my talk about product updates and qty/price comes into play.

Adding a product through the Magento 2 REST API is actually quite simple. They have all the parameters and attributes and other things that you’d want to set in the JSON request. You can even setup an image or video in media gallery.

I launched a new Magento 2 project back in March.  Our current web site was on a hosted shopping cart platform that had absolutely no flexibility outside of the theme.  We needed something we could customize and interface with our custom-built ERP.  Having a background in Magento, and the Magento 2 REST API looking attractive, we decided to go that direction.