Pushing PIM data to Enterspeed – according to developers

It’s not really about what we think about the Speed Layer. Every day developers use Enterspeed to solve infrastructural issues, and their experiences are what matters. So, we asked one.

Malthe Bjerregaard Petersen is Backend Developer at our implementation partner Novicell and has been through a few projects using Enterspeed as a vehicle for PIM data.

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Enterspeed PIM integration

By Malthe Bjerregaard Petersen, Backend Developer, Novicell

Product Information Management systems can contain many different data pieces that you need in order to complete a product – before presenting and selling it on your webshop.

Some of these pieces you might only need directly on the product itself and some of them you might want to display as single entities on your webshop.

The problem

At Novicell, we often encounter clients that need to display different pieces of PIM data on their webshop. It’s data that’s directly or indirectly part of their sellable product.

The sellable product itself contains prices, stock, and product data that lives in the client’s e-commerce systems, while some of the data also needs to be available as separate pages on the webshop.

Many e-commerce systems don’t support, or has poor support for, content that are not products or categories.

The content can be many different things but imagine that you are running a webshop that sells cakes. Now imagine that you wish to explain more about the ingredients in your cakes and therefore need a page with a unique URL for each ingredient.

Your e-commerce system doesn’t support content and therefore you now need some additional data layer to place your data in – and it needs to be performant.

The solution

What we at Novicell do when we have Enterspeed available is making a simple integration of that content into Enterspeed’s Speed Layer.

Enterspeed doesn’t care about what you put into it, it only cares about how it is going to be served again and that is exactly what solves our issue.

Going back to the ingredients from the cakeshop example. We don’t ingest all the product data into Enterspeed, but only the ingredient data that we need to display separate pages on the webshop.

Using Enterspeed we can now create routes and map the ingredients data into the view models we need on our webshop. And just like that the data we need on the webshop is available. Voila!

The integration itself

You can make your integration in plenty of ways, but the simplest and fastest solution is probably to make a serverless function.

How you trigger your serverless function is up to you, but webhooks or consuming messages from a queue are probably most suited for a quick start. 

I have made an example with our cakeshop integrating the ingredients into Enterspeed, so you can see for yourself how simple it can be.

Note 👉 Before you can run the example make sure you have an Enterspeed tenant and have setup a Data Source. See how to do it Enterspeed's docs. 

My example is with an Azure function, triggered by a HTTP request.

Check it out on GitHub!

Go ahead and try ingesting some data into Enterspeed.

I hope you have fun with it🥳

Malthe Bjerregaard Petersen is .NET developer & MACH enthusiast @ Novicell. He's been at Novicell since 2017 and was one of the first ever developers to test and build on Enterspeed.