What are the best practices for integrating external product data into a PHP-based e-commerce platform like xtcommerce?

To integrate external product data into a PHP-based e-commerce platform like xtcommerce, you can create a script that retrieves the external data using APIs or web scraping, then parse and format the data before inserting it into the database. It's important to handle errors gracefully and ensure data consistency by validating and sanitizing the input. 

// Example PHP code snippet for integrating external product data into xtcommerce

// Retrieve external product data using API or web scraping
$external_data = file_get_contents('https://api.example.com/products');
$external_data = json_decode($external_data, true);

// Parse and format the data
foreach ($external_data as $product) {
    $name = $product['name'];
    $price = $product['price'];
    $description = $product['description'];

    // Insert data into xtcommerce database
    $query = "INSERT INTO products (name, price, description) VALUES ('$name', '$price', '$description')";
    $result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);

    if (!$result) {
        echo "Error inserting product data: " . mysqli_error($connection);
    }
}

Keywords

API integration data mapping XML parsing error handling data validation

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