If you are already using a PIM system, you can stop reading!

If you have been using Commerce for a while, you probably have seen this screen – yes, in Commerce Manager

This allow you to export a catalog, but without a caveat: the exported catalog, most likely, does not contains any linked assets. The reason for that was the asset content types need to be present at the context of the site. In Commerce Manager, the general advice is to not deploy the content types there for simpler management.

Import/Export are also missing features in Catalog UI compared to Commerce Manager. I wish I could have added it, but given my Dojo skill, it’s better to write something UI-less, and here you go: a controller to let you download a catalog with everything attached. Well, here is the entire code that you can drop into your project and build:

using EPiServer.Data;
using EPiServer.Framework.Blobs;
using EPiServer.Logging;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Net.Http.Headers;
using System.Web.Http;
using EPiServer.Commerce.Catalog.ContentTypes;
using Mediachase.Commerce.Catalog;
using Mediachase.Commerce.Catalog.ImportExport;
using System.IO;
using System.IO.Compression;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;

namespace EPiServer.Personalization.Commerce.CatalogFeed.Internal
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Download a catalog.
    /// </summary>
    public class CatalogExportController : ApiController
    {
        private readonly CatalogImportExport _importExport;
        private readonly IBlobFactory _blobFactory;
        private readonly IContentLoader _contentLoader;
        private readonly ReferenceConverter _referenceConverter;
        internal const string DownloadRoute = "episerverapi/catalogs/";
        private static readonly Guid _blobContainerIdentifier = Guid.Parse("119AD01E-ECD1-4781-898B-6DEC356FC8D8");

        private static readonly ILogger _logger = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(CatalogExportController));

        /// <summary>
        /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="CatalogExportController"/> class.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="importExport">Catalog import export</param>
        /// <param name="blobFactory">The blob factory.</param>
        /// <param name="contentLoader">The content loader.</param>
        /// <param name="referenceConverter"></param>
        public CatalogExportController(CatalogImportExport importExport,
            IBlobFactory blobFactory,
            IContentLoader contentLoader,
            ReferenceConverter referenceConverter)
        {
            _importExport = importExport;
            _blobFactory = blobFactory;
            _contentLoader = contentLoader;
            _referenceConverter = referenceConverter;

            _importExport.IsModelsAvailable = true;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Direct download catalog export for admins.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="catalogName">Name of catalog to be exported.</param>
        /// <returns>
        /// Catalog.zip if successful else HttpResponseMessage containing error.
        /// </returns>
        [HttpGet]
        [Authorize(Roles = "CommerceAdmins")]
        [Route(DownloadRoute)]
        public HttpResponseMessage Index(string catalogName)
        {
            var catalogs = _contentLoader.GetChildren<CatalogContent>(_referenceConverter.GetRootLink());
            var catalog = catalogs.First(x => x.Name.Equals(catalogName, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase));
            if (catalog != null)
            {
                return GetFile(catalog.Name);
            }

            return new HttpResponseMessage
            { Content = new StringContent($"There is no catalog with name {catalogName}.") };
        }

        private HttpResponseMessage GetFile(string catalogName)
        {
            var container = Blob.GetContainerIdentifier(_blobContainerIdentifier);
            var blob = _blobFactory.CreateBlob(container, ".zip");
            using (var stream = blob.OpenWrite())
            {
                using (var zipArchive = new ZipArchive(stream, ZipArchiveMode.Create, false))
                {
                    var entry = zipArchive.CreateEntry("catalog.xml");

                    using (var entryStream = entry.Open())
                    {
                        _importExport.Export(catalogName, entryStream, Path.GetTempPath());
                    }
                }
            }

            var response = new HttpResponseMessage
            {
                Content = new PushStreamContent(async (outputStream, content, context) =>
                {
                    var fileStream = blob.OpenRead();

                    await fileStream.CopyToAsync(outputStream)
                        .ContinueWith(task =>
                        {
                            fileStream.Close();
                            outputStream.Close();

                            if (task.IsFaulted)
                            {
                                _logger.Error($"Catalog download failed", task.Exception);
                                return;
                            }

                            _logger.Information($"Feed download completed.");

                        });
                }, new MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/zip"))
            };
            return response;
        }
    }
}

And now you can access to this path http://yoursite.com/episerverapi/catalogs?catalogName=fashion to download the catalog named “Fashion”.

A few notes:

• This requires Admin access, for obvious reasons. You will need to log in to your website first before accessing the path above
• It can take some time for big catalogs, so be patient if that’s the case ;). Yes another approach is to have this as a scheduled job when you can export the catalog in background, but that make the selection of catalog to export much more complicated. If you have only one catalog, then go ahead!