Syncing & System Identifiers

To properly design and implement the API in your application, you will need to understand how product data syncs between the GDSN Connect and your client application.

• Linked Customers: At a high level, each authorized Customer within the client application must be linked with a specific Customer within GDSN Connect. This ensures that customer item databases are isolated from each other. New customers

  • Upon registration of a new authorized Customer, the customer will be set up in GDSN Connect based on information provided by Client. This includes the Customer ID, which must be unique across all customers of the Client.

• Linked Items: To get data from the GDSN Connect Database, every Client App Item Record in a customer's item database must be linked to a corresponding Local Item Record within that customer's database in GDSN Connect through an initial sync process. To maintain this link, the Client App must provide this unique item identifier--the Client App Item ID--to GDSN Connect.

• Matched Items: These Local Items in GDSN Connect can then be matched to a Source Record from the GDSN Connect Database, which copies the attributes from the source record to the Local Record. The Client App can then sync the enhanced Local Record data and apply it to the corresponding Client App Item Record.

This architecture should be transparent and invisible to users of the client application, but it's important for the product designers and developers to understand so that they can properly implement the API. For example, when getting data from GDSN for the first time from the Client app, the item must be "synced" to GDSN Connect first, and then it gets "matched" to a Source record from GDSN Connect Database. Once the record has been matched, the data can then be "synced" back to the client app.