Supported Business Data Entities
As part of Tulip’s proven architectural best practice, Tulip clients receive a cloud-hosted data instance that hosts Tulip mobile app backend configuration and a data cache.
Access to cached copies of the retail data entities enables Tulip to persist data securely and access it through defined APIs from Tulip’s lightweight iOS mobile app. By ensuring that the mobile app always has a set of standard Tulip services to communicate with, the app does not need to be customized each time for a different client implementation, thereby speeding up the implementation timeline.
Moreover, the indexing of information on Tulip’s Cloud Platform makes it possible to search the static information (images, key values for products for instance) in the fastest manner possible.
To be able to load data entities like product content, prices, customers, and purchase history, Tulip Bulk API enables client IT systems to automate and periodically refresh the Tulip server cache. Caching records for these data entities allows Tulip mobile apps to interface, using standard, pre-built and tuned APIs, with Tulip’s cloud backend, for searching and retrieval of product and customer details — without necessarily directly talking in real time to a Client side system interface. See this page that highlights additional details why this design has worked for so many of our Clients for long term sustainability and maintainability on both Tulip and Client side.
Hosting data in the Tulip Cloud backend also enables client IT teams to manage data and maintain internal systems uninterrupted, independent of Tulip Platform integration — as long as the Bulk data synchronization is not impacted.
Supported Data Entities
Tulip’s Bulk API service allows you to load initial and delta records from respective client master systems for the following data entities:
- Stores
- Employees
- Catalog
- Catalogs
- Categories
- Products and Variants and inherent types
- Prices
- Inventory
- Customer
- Order Transaction History
- Tasks (Follow ups for Employees)
- Authentication (To create a Tulip user for an existing Employee)
Important: To ensure Tulip backend database integrity, you must load these data entities in a prescribed sequence. See Hands-On Tutorial with Tulip Bulk API for a sample of defining and building out client-side data records properly, and see Resource Dependencies - Adding resources in the right order for details about sequencing entities correctly.