Attribute Mapping
Business Central knows item attributes: named properties for filtering and searching. Icecat delivers dozens of specifications per item — which of them your business needs, only you know. The module therefore activates nothing on its own; it makes a suggestion from your own data instead.
The Path
- Switch on Import Specifications in the setup and enrich a few items
- Open Icecat Attribute Mapping and run Suggest from Cached Content — the list fills with the specifications that actually occur in your data, sorted by Item Count
- Set Enabled on the few specifications people really filter by
- Switch on Write Item Attributes in the setup
- Run Write Attributes Now
Step 5 works across the entire cache and costs not a single new Icecat request. Changing the selection later is therefore cheap: one more specification costs another run, not new requests.
The Columns
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Enabled | Whether this specification is written as an item attribute |
| Feature / Group | Name and group as Icecat delivers them |
| Item Count | How many of your items carry it — the basis for the decision |
| Attribute Type | Text, Decimal or Option, suggested from Icecat's value type |
| Use Raw Value | Raw value (language-neutral, numeric) instead of the presentation value |
| Attribute Name | A different name for the BC attribute; empty = the Icecat name |
| BC Attribute Name | The name of the linked attribute as it is called today |
Keep the volumes in mind
Every enabled specification creates one attribute plus one assignment per item. Five specifications across ten thousand items are fifty thousand assignments. Pick the few that customers filter by.
Behaviour in Detail
- If a BC attribute with the same name already exists, that one is used — no duplicate is created.
- A decimal value that cannot be converted to a number is stored as text anyway: losing the information would be worse than losing comparability.
- Removing brand content also removes the attribute assignments created from Icecat specifications — manually maintained attributes on the same item stay.