If you follow our design-first approach, you can skip this section. Instead, you can directly create a block and ingest data later on.

Ingest is the process of importing data (products, categories, orders, etc.) from external sources into your project using integrations (see reference). This can be both, a one-time import or a continuous process.

Manage them from the Integrations section of your dashboard.

Overview of all data source integrations

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How does ingest work?

During the ingest process, your data completes two steps.

1

Data Feed

Frontstack retrieves data from an external source.

2

Data Sync

Frontstack transforms the data and stores it in a Storage.

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How does Frontstack retrieve data?

In a fresh project, Frontstack does not retrieve any data from external sources. To retrieve data, you need to set up an Integration.

An integration is a connection to an external data source - like a database, API, or file. It is configured with credentials and options needed to retrieve data.

Integrations provide one or more Data Feeds. Think of a data feed as a resource - for example, a product, category, order, etc. For example, an integration with Shopware will provide two data feeds: products and categories.

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Data Feeds

UI for creating a data feed

A data feed contains specific configuration for fetching a resource. A feed can be managed after clicking on an integration in your Integrations section.

For example, a data feed for products might have a filter to only fetch products with a certain status or the name of the file that contains the product data.

On top of that, a data feed defines how Frontstack receives updates. The most common way is to use a webhook, but it can also be a cron job or a manual process (push data to a specific URL).

When a data feed is created, Frontstack will try to fetch data from the external source and infer the schema of the data.

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Data Sync

Overview of all data feeds in the data sync section

After Frontstack receives the data, it will transform it into storage records.

In order to populate a storage, you need to configure the Data Sync for a data feed. This process is explained in more detail in the Storage section.

Once everything is set up, the data feed will sync data to the storage end-to-end.