Data feeds through SFTP | Acquia CDP | Acquia Product Documentation

Customer Data Platform (CDP) is built around several entities such as Customer and Product.

CDP data feeds provide a standard set of flat-file feeds to define how you can send relevant data into CDP. These feeds support all the use cases that are available with CDP.

CDP presents the feeds as a fixed set of entities and attributes. You can extend the feeds with client-specific attributes and entities. To configure such extensions, contact your CDP customer value manager (CVM).

Required and optional feeds¶

The following are the required standard feeds:

Feed	Feed name
Customer	Customer_[DateTime].csv
Transaction	Transaction_[DateTime].csv
TransactionItem	TransactionItem_[DateTime].csv
Organization	Organization_[DateTime].csv
Product	Product_[DateTime].csv
ProductCategory	ProductCategory_[DateTime].csv

The following are the optional feeds that you can use for specific use cases:

Feed	Feed name
Address	Address_[DateTime].csv
CustomerAddressXRef	CustomerAddressXRef_[DateTime].csv
ProductCategoryXRef	ProductCategoryXRef_[DateTime].csv
Event	Event_[DateTime].csv
PaymentMethod	PaymentMethod_[DateTime].csv
TransactionPaymentMethodXRef	TransactionPaymentMethodXRef_[DateTime].csv
Campaign	Campaign_[DateTime].csv
Dispatch	Dispatch_[DateTime].csv
Message	Message_[DateTime].csv

Note

Full feeds are not required every day. After an initial full feed, it is more efficient to send only the new or updated data to CDP as incremental feeds.
Web and email events come in through other mechanisms. Therefore, they are not part of the required feeds.

Feed format¶

CDP feeds are designed to be source system-agnostic. If you cannot extract the necessary feeds from your existing systems, CDP offers integration services.

The following table lists the formatting requirements for feeds:

Requirement	Description
Name	Each file name must have the following naming convention: `entityName_yyyymmddhhmiss.csv` For example, `customer_20201224235959.csv`. If multiple sources feed the same CDP entity, add a source identifier to the front of the file name, `sourceName_entityName_yyyymmddhhmiss.csv`. For example, `crm_customer_20201224235959.csv`.
Format	The comma-separated values (CSV), with the conventions used by OpenCSV.
Record delimiter	Line breaks (`{CR}{LF}`). Record delimiters cannot be present within the fields and you must replace them with a whitespace character.
Field delimiter	Comma (`,`), tab (`\t`), or pipe (`\|`): If your data contains field delimiters, use double quotes as text qualifiers. Without text qualifiers, you must escape with a backslash double quotes in the data, `3"` → `3\"`.
Text qualifier (recommended)	Double quotes (“) Double quotes within the fields need to be escaped by prepending them with another double quote (“”), ” → “”, or by prepending a double-quote with a backslash ("), ” → ". If text qualifiers are not used, leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed.
Escape character	backslash () Escape characters within fields are replaced by two escape characters. → \
Header	A header row that names the columns is required. Column names cannot begin or end with whitespace.
Footer	A footer row is not supported.
Encoding	Files must be encoded using UTF-8.
Date/datetime formats	The following date/datetime formats are supported by default: dd-MM-yyyy yyyy-MM-dd MM/dd/yyyy yyyy/MM/dd dd MMM yyyy dd MMMM yyyy yyyyMMdd HHmm dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm dd MMM yyyy HH:mm dd MMMM yyyy HH:mm yyyyMMdd HHmmss dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss dd MMMM yyyy HH:mm:ss yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS Additional date/datetime formats can be added custom by your CDP integration team
Timezone	The timezone of the file is communicated to the CDP integration team.
Compression	Each file can be compressed through zip or gzip compression. Each file must be compressed separately as multiple files cannot be compressed together in a compressed directory. The compression method must be included in the file name. For example, `customer_20201114232015.csv.zip` or `customer_20201114232015.csv.gz`.
Encryption	Each file can be encrypted through pgp or gpg encryption. Each file must be encrypted separately, and must not be signed. You must include the encryption method in the file name. For example, `customer_20201114232015.csv.pgp` or `customer_20201114232015.csv.gpg`. If you want to encrypt your files, contact your implementation consultant who provides you with a public key for encrypting the files.

Each file must contain only one record per primary key, the latest and greatest version of that record. Since CDP is a distributed system, files are not processed top to bottom or bottom to top. Each file is split up and processed by multiple machines. If two records exist in one file with the same identifier, then CDP cannot guarantee which version of that record is recorded to CDP’s data warehouse.

Product and Product Category feeds¶

CDP supports having products mapped to the product categories within the product feed (1:1 or n:1 relationships). However, to support n:n relationships, a separate cross-reference feed is required. For more information, see Product Category XRef feed.