Category Automations

What Category Automations are

Category Automations let you automatically assign Specification groups to products based on their category.

Instead of manually adding specification groups per product, you define the structure once on the category level. When a product is assigned to that category, KatanaPIM automatically links the right specification groups to that product.

This helps you keep product data consistent, scalable, and structured — without manual work.

Automations follow the category hierarchy (nested logic)

Category Automations respect the category trail.

This means:

• Automations set on parent categories are inherited by child categories.
• When you assign a category to a product, the product receives automations from:
  • the selected category and
  • all parent categories above it

Example trail:

Fashion → Women → Dresses

If automations exist on:

• Fashion
• Women
• Dresses

Then assigning Dresses applies automations from all three levels.

It stops at the selected category level and does not go deeper than that.

When do Category Automations run?

Automations do not run instantly on every small change. They run based on specific triggers:

• When an automation is published
• When a category that contains an automation is added to a product
• When a category’s parent category is changed
• When a background task runs to process category automations

Product type limitations

You can optionally limit an automation to one or more product types.

This is useful if a specification group should only apply to specific product structures.

Rules and behavior

Category Automations follow these rules:

• Automations can only be configured on the category level
• You cannot add the same category + specification group automation more than once
• The same automation may exist on different levels in the category hierarchy
• A specification group is never linked to the same product more than once