Feeds Ready

Feeds provide your inventory data to the Actions Center. This daily Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) upload updates all of the merchants, services, and availability slots data. Feeds specify which merchants you support, their availability, and any special features required to confirm that Google displays your inventory properly. Feeds are uploaded to the SFTP dropboxes that are configured when you provide your SSH key in Setup.

You must complete the following Feeds Ready tasks before you move to Booking Server:

• Merchant Feed Ready
• Services Feed Ready
• Availability Feed Ready
• Data quality

The tasks will be marked as completed and turn green after you upload your feeds successfully. Review the linked documentation to complete each specific milestone task.

For proper functionality of your Dining Reservations End-to-End integration, you need to provide daily Merchant Feed, Services Feed, and Availability Feed uploads automatically. Your automated feed infrastructure must provide your full inventory.

Note: All feeds must be uploaded with processing_instruction as PROCESS_AS_COMPLETE. PROCESS_AS_INCREMENTAL is deprecated and can't be used.

Feed types

Dining Reservations End-to-End integrations require the following feeds and their upload frequencies:

Feed	Description	Frequency	Sample
Merchant	Describes your merchants.	Once every 24 hours	Merchant Feed sample
Services	Describe the services of your merchants.	Once every 24 hours	Services Feed sample
Availability	Describes the available slots for services of your merchants. A minimum 30 days of coverage must be provided. To extend the coverage to 90 days, contact Google support through the Actions Center contact form.	Once every 24 hours	Availability Feed sample

Note: The Actions Center expects accurate real-time inventory status for party sizes.

Feed formats are described with the protocol buffer 3 syntax, but you can upload your feeds per the corresponding JSON format. Refer to the feed samples for the JSON format. We recommend that you upload the feeds in JSON format.

Naming conventions and metadata

File names

If you use sharding, the feeds that you upload must have unique names that specify the feed type and count. A timestamp for feed generation satisfies the unique requirement of your feed file naming.

Structure: {feed_name}_{timestamp_epoch}_{shard_nunber}_{total_shard}.json

Example: availability_feed_1574117613_001_of_002.json.gz

Define IDs

When you define IDs for your merchants or other attributes that require an ID, we strongly recommend to use UID or UUIDs. You can provide your own alphanumeric solution as long as IDs remain distinct across your platform.

Note: Never use Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) as IDs.

Metadata

When you create feeds, the generation_timestamp must reflect the time when the data was pulled from the database. Reuse of this value across feeds can lead to processing errors.

Nonce values, random or non-repeating numbers, must be unique across feed types and can't be reused. The value must match for all files in the specific sharded feed.

Feed file size

Sharding feed files

Based on your inventory, sharding or breaking up feeds into multiple files might be necessary. Your feeds might need sharding in the following conditions:

• Compressed gzip feed exceeds 200 MB for one file.
  • Example: generated Availability Feed is 1 GB. This must be sharded to five or more separate shards.
• Partner inventory is distributed across systems or regions which results in difficulty reconciling the inventory.
  • Example: partner has US and EU inventory that live in separate systems. The feed might be generated with two shards. One for the US and one for the EU with the same nonce and generation_timestamp.

For more information, see Shard feed files tutorials and best practices.

A feed can constitute multiple files called shards. To determine the size of the feeds, use the following guidelines:

• Suggested feed sharding:
  • Merchant Feed: one shard.
  • Services Feed: one shard.
  • Availability Feed: less than 20 shards. If you have a business justification that requires more than specified amount, contact support for further instruction.
• Size of feed files and sharding:
  • Keep shard file size less than 200 MB after compression. Use multiple shards if needed.
  • Individual records sent in one shard don't need to be sent in the same shard in future feeds.
  • For better performance, split data evenly among the shards to make all the shard files similar in size.
  • If necessary, use gzip to compress plain text JSON feeds for each individual feed shard.

Compress feed files

Any JSON or PB3 file can be compressed with gzip before you upload. This can significantly reduce the byte size of daily feeds.

Each shard file must be gzip'd and uploaded individually such as gzip*.json. Compressed feed shards must end in .json.gz or .pb3.gz.

Upload the feeds to your SFTP dropbox

After you generate the Merchant, Service, and Availability Feeds, you can upload your feeds to the Sandbox or Production environment through the SFTP dropbox. The SFTP dropbox is configured when you provide your SSH key in Setup. The Google SFTP server is available at sftp://partnerupload.google.com on port 19321.

Google reviews and validates feeds files as soon as they are uploaded to the SFTP dropbox. If the feed is sharded across multiple files, they are processed after you upload the last file. If your feed contains errors, an email is sent to you with the feed error codes. Errors prevent defined merchants, services, or availability from being ingested. After the feeds are validated, it can take up to 24 hours until the feeds appear on the frontend.

Warning: Upload your feeds to the Production dropboxes only after Google tests and confirms your feeds in the Sandbox environment. To access the Sandbox environment, set the environment switcher at the top of your Actions Center window to Sandbox.