Selected fields: Render products without database look-up
- Sylvain Paillard
This post describe how you can use Boxalino Narrative API “selected” return fields in your API request in order to avoid doing a look-up of the product properties to show product title, price, pricture, … in listing or recommendation sliders.
Do I have to use Boxalino selected fields?
No, if you prefer, you can retrieve a product identifier (typically the ‘products_group_id’) and use it to retrieve the required product data from your database use them in your template to display the products.
What are the advantages of the Boxalino selected fields?
The first one is performance. Boxalino, is a very fast no-sql real-time service with a total processing time typically under 50 milliseconds per request. Adding return fields so you have all you need for your template display saves you the processing computation of doing any database query on your side and therefore can save 50 up to 300 milliseconds of server-side page load ( depending on your environment).
The second one is maintainability. Boxalino provides built in logic to find the right price for grouped products and to shrink, so your template will have less business logic to set-up an to maintain.
The third one is dynamism & personalization. Boxalino can change the value of any of the fields in real-time. For example, if you show one result for products which exist in several color, Boxalino will automatically change the picture of the selected picture field to match the user selected in case the user has selected a facet on the color (or Boxalino knows that a color is the favorite color of the user).
The fourth one is ab testing. Boxalino can provide different values in the selected fields for different ab test variant and therefore you can easily test if showing the cheapest price of the product group is the best strategy for your sales conversion rate.
What are the Boxalino Selected fields?
Boxalino automatically generates the following selected fields for your accounts (so you don’t have to do anything to set them up) and you can directly request them as return fields in your API requests.
In case the value returned by these fields do not match what you expect or need, please contact Boxalino so a special logic can be configured for you.
field name | description | default logic |
|---|---|---|
selected_title | the title of the product | the title of the product group if provided or of the simple product if it has only 1 variant |
selected_sales_price | the price after discount of the product | the sales price of the cheapest active variant of the group |
selected_list_price | the price before discount of the product | the list price of the cheapest active variant of the group |
selected_link | the link to the product detail page | the link to the cheapest active variant of the group (or of the group in case there is no individual links per variant) |
selected_image | the image of the product | the default main image of the product group and (if a variant property like color or size has been selected by the user) the main image of the product variant matching the (color/size) user filter selection |