Item Attributes and Customer Attributes can be managed either manually or automatically by using mappings. Attribute mapping is a very powerful feature which allows you to reuse data which already resides somewhere in your Business Central database. As long as there is a relation with the Item or Customer, the mapping system can pickup the desired value. 

Below you can see the Business Central item card. In this environment also has an ISV application called Tyre Turbo Plus installed, which allows to easily manage car tyre specific details. Now, for our demo customer this is very important product data, and of course this data should be made available in their Magento store as well. 

To make this data available without having to re-key anything we create a Mapped Attribute. Go to Attributes > Attributes, click on the New button. We'll make this a Dropdown attribute, because we want to use it for Layered Navigation (filters) as well. We do not have to provide any Options manually. Instead, go to Mapping, enable it, and select 27 (the item table) for Mapped Table ID. Select 1 as the Mapped Table Item No. Field ID. This is the relation we are using. And finally select the desired field by select a Mapped Field ID. In this case we will use the bespoke field for the Season value.   

Another way of creating a mapping is to directly map to a standard Business Central Attribute. In the example below we are selling iPhones, and we already have some Item Attributes configured. In this case Color and Memory, and to are quite useful for our Magento store as well. 

Again go to Attributes > Attributes, create a new one, and scroll to the Mapping section. Now type in 7500 as the Mapped Table ID. As this is the table number for the standard BC Attributes, the system will automatically disable the next 3 fields, and all that is left to do, is to select the attribute you want to map to. In this case we will use Memory. 

Mapping Customer Attributes

Customer Attributes can be mapped the exact same way. Go to Attributes > Customer Attributes. Create a new one. In this example we'll create one for Credit Limit. So we select table number 18 (the customer table), use field 1 for the relation, and field 20 will be our value.  

Click here to read more about Customer Attributes.