This post is guest post by our Enterprise Partners at BoaBaz. It is a good introduction into the Magento Dataflow terms and definitions. It should be a good starting point for developers who want to implement data exchange (import/export) between Magento and some 3rd party system.

Parts of this article were initially posted on Baobaz Blog: Magento Dataflow.

Cet article est consultable en Français sur le blog de Baobaz : Magento Dataflow.

One of major features of e-commerce websites is the possibility to share data with offline sale management systems. Magento made data exchange flexible and quite easy with DataFlow module.

Magento DataFlow is a data exchange framework that use four types of components: adapter, parser, mapper and validator. At current state of development validators are not implemented, but are reserved for future use.

via Magento – Blog – Magento Development: Introduction to Magento Dataflow – eCommerce Software for Growth.