Requesting product recommendations via Webservice / SOAP
End of Life
Please note: the SOAP interface will no longer be updated or upgraded. We recommend the REST-API for new customers. If you have been using the SOAP interface so far, you can go on using it. We do however recommend changing your integration interface to improve performance.
Alternately, you can use the web service interface. In addition to requesting the product recommendations, it also supports an option to recreate the recommendations matrix and download the latest export files if required.
In order to access the WSDL end point for the Recommendation Engine and generate the corresponding client, please customise and then call the following URL:
$stringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml($body)Obtaining the recommendations
In order to retrieve a list of product recommendations, use the method getRecommendation. With this method, you specify parameters comprising the number of recommendations, the article number of the product for which you want to obtain recommendations, and the channel name. As with all other calls, parameters must be passed for authentication. You can find further details on authentication in the FACT-Finder Integration documentation.
The output of this method provides you with a RecommendationResult object, which additionally to timeout information also includes a list of Record objects from which you can request the individual field data, as when searching.
Creating and updating the recommendation matrix
The recommendations are based on the sales data provided by you. This can be imported at regular intervals on an automated basis or manually updated by calling a specific method. You need to call the method importData if you wish to import this data afresh. At this point you can decide to either have the data imported for one channel or for all channels. Use the Boolean parameter to specify whether the sales information file should be downloaded again beforehand.
This is only of significance if you supply the data in a file and the URL is configured in the FACT-Finder system. An authentication object is also required.