Feed Runs, Warnings, and Tracing a Value

To see what an import did, open a catalog's Activity tab: it lists every import with its counts, and each one expands to a full log, statistics, and the fields that changed. To understand why a single value came out the way it did, use Trace a product — it walks one product through your rules to the final catalog output.

The health strip: your feed's status at a glance#

The health strip sits at the top of every catalog page and is always visible. It's the quickest read on your feed:

• A status light plus, when something's wrong, "Needs attention — N warnings".
• "Last import {time ago}" and the catalog's total "{N} products".
• While an import is running, live progress — "Importing… {stage}" — and an "Import stalled?" prompt if it looks stuck.
• When an import finishes, a one-line summary: "{N} new, {N} updated · {N} excluded · {N} couldn't be read · took {duration}".
• The "Import now" button.

A note on "Import now": it processes your last published configuration, not your draft. If you have unpublished edits, clicking it warns you and offers to publish first. Until the catalog has a published product feed there is nothing to import, so the button is greyed out: hover it to see whether you still need to add a product feed or only to publish the one you've added. That trap is covered in full in Fixing your feed data with rules and Transforming your feed.

The Activity tab: what each import did#

The Activity tab is the catalog's home view. It lists every import as a row, most recent first, with these columns:

• Started — when the import ran.
• Trigger — what kicked it off.
• Status — how it finished.
• Products — how many products the import covered.
• Changed — how many products' data changed.
• Excluded — how many products a rule dropped.
• Warnings — how many distinct warning types the import raised.
• Duration — how long it took.

The list shows the five most recent imports — the ones you almost always want — with a pager below the table to step back through the older history.

When you publish, Renable also checks what your changes would do first — a preview of what will change, or, the first time a catalog runs on rules, a check of your whole feed. Those publish-check runs are hidden by default; a "Show publish checks" toggle brings them into the list when you want to see them, and hides them again to leave only real imports.

A publish check is advisory: publishing never waits for it and is never blocked by what it finds, and if the check itself fails the publish dialog says so and still lets you publish. It reads up to the first 50,000 rows of your feed — past that it says the counts cover only the start of the feed. Its counters read differently from an import's, because nothing was imported: it reports the rows it read and the products your rules would produce from them.

Open a run for the full detail#

Click any import in the list to expand it. Inside you get:

• The log — the import's stage-by-stage record, useful when a run failed or behaved oddly.
• Statistics — a row of chips counting exactly what happened: Total rows, Seen, Created, Updated, Output unchanged, Excluded, Soft deleted, Parse failed, and Warnings. Output unchanged is the normal case for a stable feed — those products were re-read and came out identical. Parse failed is the "couldn't be read" count from the summary line: rows the importer couldn't make sense of. Soft deleted is products that were in the feed before but have now dropped out of it.
• Changed fields — a chip per field that changed in this import; open one for a before/after popover so you can see the actual old and new values. This covers the regular product fields, each custom attribute by its own name, and the product's images and reasons to buy (each of those counts as one changed field when anything in the list changes). So when an import updates many products, the chips tell you what moved — even when it's only a single custom attribute or an image link. The popover also has a View products link that opens the products page filtered to the products whose value changed in that import — for very large changes it shows the first 1,000 of them, and says so.
• Products with warnings — the list of products this run raised a warning for, so you can go straight to them.

Warnings: from a message to the exact products#

Below the imports, the Activity tab lists the warnings and errors from your feed. Warnings dedupe on their text — if the same problem hits 500 products, you see one warning that tells you it affected 500 products, not 500 separate lines. From a warning you can drill down to exactly the affected products, so a message becomes a working list instead of a vague alarm.

This covers products the import had to skip, too: a product missing one of the core basics (ID, link, title, or price) can't be imported, and surfaces as a warning that names the missing field and counts the affected products — "14 products are missing price" — rather than disappearing silently. A row the importer couldn't read at all is reported the same way. These warnings clear on their own once an import comes through clean.

Each warning also carries an "Ask Aimée to investigate" action — one click hands the problem to Aimée, who looks into what caused it and what to do about it.

"Only the first of several values is used"#

One kind of warning in this list isn't about an import at all. When a mapping or a rule reads a column that holds several values for some rows of your feed — a repeated image link, say — at a place that can only take one (a field like Title or Image link, a Split step, a group key, the value a condition compares against), Renable warns you: "The Image link mapping: “additional_image_link” holds several values in 1,234 rows of your feed and only the first will be used. Add First, Last, Nth or Join to choose." The sentence starts with where to look, before the colon — "The {field} mapping" is that field's row on the Mapping tab, "The rule '{name}'" a rule on the Rules tab — and the number counts rows of the feed file that hold more than one value in that column, before rules, splits and exclusions turn rows into products. A count can come from the whole feed ("in 1,234 rows of your feed"), from a partial read ("in at least 1,234 rows of your feed"), or from the 50-row sample ("in 3 of the 50 sampled rows"), and the sentence says which. When Renable read only part of your feed — the analysis stopped at its row or column limit, or the stream broke — a column it never reached is warned about as a "may" with no count, in the Activity tab, the publish dialog, the editor and Aimée alike. A field that takes several values — Additional image link, Product highlights, an attribute — keeps every value of a plain list, so it is warned about only for a list of lists (a Map each with a Split inside it and no Flatten after it): "The Additional image link mapping: “sizes” is a list of lists in 1,234 rows of your feed and only the first of each inner list will be used. Add Flatten to keep every value."

Renable works these out by reading your rules and mapping against your feed's columns, and recomputes them on every import and every publish. The warning goes away on its own once the rule carries a First, Last, Nth or Join step — First, if the first value is the one you want — or a Flatten step for a list of lists, and every such warning disappears if the catalog stops running on rules altogether. A warning that says "may hold several values" means something before that point — a Filter, a Split, a condition or an Otherwise branch — may change how many values there are; the warning doesn't say which. A catalog shows at most 50 of them, the certain ones and the most widespread first.

The same warnings appear in the publish dialog before you publish, as chips under Warnings named after the column — and while Renable hasn't yet read your whole draft feed for them, the dialog says so, "Your whole feed hasn't been checked yet for fields that use only the first of several values.", so an empty list there means not checked yet, not clean. While you edit, the rule editor and the Mapping tab show the same places with no count (see Steps: changing a value before it is used).

Two ways these differ from the import's warnings: they carry no list of affected products, so to follow a real product open the Mapping tab, find the column in the rail and use "Trace a product that has a value in this column"; and every warning Renable is certain of counts as a Warning in the dashboard's Needs attention queue, however few rows it affects — a "may" warning is a minor issue, shown here and on the project's Overview. A warning you've decided not to act on can be archived: it stays archived until it gets worse. What the steps do with several values is explained in Steps: changing a value before it is used.

Trace a product: why a value came out the way it did#

When a field on one product looks wrong and you want to know why, use Trace a product. Open it with the Trace button on the toolbar of both the Rules tab and the Mapping tab.

1. Pick the product you want to follow in the Product picker at the top — from the sample, or type a product ID, a name or any other value in your feed's columns to search your whole feed. A match marked "Too large to preview" can't be traced: Renable traces a product exactly as your feed holds it, never a cut-down copy.
2. Renable shows a vertical pipeline of your rules as step-cards. Each card shows the rule's number, its name, and its one-line summary.
3. Every card carries a status chip: "applied" if the rule's conditions matched this product, "otherwise applied" if they didn't but the rule's "Otherwise…" actions ran, or "didn't apply" if the rule did nothing to it (those cards are greyed out). When a rule changed a field, the change is written out as field: before → after, so you can watch a value move through your rules step by step.
4. If a rule splits the product into variants, a chip picker lets you switch between the variants and trace each one.
5. At the end, a "Catalog output" table shows the final value of every field. Each field a rule changed carries a "set by {rule}" note, so you can see which rule is responsible. Fields that came straight from your mapping, untouched by any rule, simply show their value.

Trace answers two questions at once: which rules touched this product, and what the field ended up as. If a rule you expected to apply shows "didn't apply", its conditions didn't match this product — check the condition against the product's actual values.

Rules that apply a ruleset#

When a rule uses Apply ruleset, Trace shows the ruleset's own rules nested inside that rule's card, so you can follow the product through the shared rules as well as your catalog's own. The nested part is headed "Applied ruleset" followed by the ruleset's name, and its rules are numbered under the rule that applied it: if rule 3 applied the ruleset, its rules are 3.1, 3.2 and so on. A rule that applies more than one ruleset shows one nested part per ruleset, each numbered from .1 and told apart by its heading.

• Small rulesets open, large ones folded. A ruleset with more than five rules starts folded into a single summary line, such as "Applied ruleset Nordics base — 3 of 7 rules applied · 4 columns changed · 2 fields set", with the changes the whole ruleset made listed underneath. Click the line to see its rules one by one. Parts that would read zero are left out of the summary.
• The same three chips. Each nested rule carries "applied", "otherwise applied" or "didn't apply", exactly like your catalog's own rules. If the rule that applies the ruleset shows "didn't apply", the ruleset never ran for this product and no nested part appears. If the ruleset sits in the rule's "Otherwise…" actions, the rule shows "otherwise applied" and the nested part appears as usual.
• After a split. When a rule splits the product into variants, each variant picks up where the shared steps left off. A rule that resumes after the split keeps its number and carries a "continued" chip. A ruleset the split interrupted is headed "Applied ruleset … (continued)" and carries on numbering from where it stopped, so 3.3 follows 3.2. If none of its rules were left to run, it says "no rules left to run".
• In the Catalog output. A field written by a rule inside a ruleset reads "set by" followed by the rule's name and, in parentheses, the ruleset it belongs to, for example "set by Clean up titles (in ruleset Nordics base)". Two rulesets can each have a rule with the same name, so the ruleset name tells you which one it was.

To learn how the rules Trace walks through are built, see Fixing your feed data with rules.

Barcodes that fail their check digit#

If you map a value to a GTIN, EAN, or UPC field and its check digit doesn't match, Renable doesn't silently keep a bad barcode, and it doesn't throw the product away. The product imports normally, and the barcode is kept through the import — but it's dropped before the feed reaches any ad network, so Google or Meta never receive an invalid barcode.

You'll see this in two places, describing the same thing:

• In the mapping preview, a hint: "invalid GTIN check digit — will import but be rejected by ad networks."
• After an import, a warning that those barcodes "were dropped downstream."

A failed check digit almost always means a typo or a truncated value in your source feed. Fix it at the source or correct it with a rule, and the valid barcode flows through.

FAQ#

An import ran but the Changed count is low or zero — did it work?

Yes. A feed that hasn't changed upstream produces mostly "Output unchanged" products — they were re-read and came out identical. That's the healthy steady state, not a failed import.

My edits didn't show up in the import — why?

Imports process your last published configuration, not your draft. If you edited rules or mapping and then imported, publish first (or choose Publish & import) so your changes take effect. See Transforming your feed.

A product vanished from the feed after an import — where did it go?

Check the run's Excluded and Soft deleted counts: Excluded means a rule dropped it; Soft deleted means it left the source feed. A product is missing from my feed or ads walks through every cause.

Or ask Aimée#

You don't have to sit and watch an import. Ask Aimée to wait for the import to finish and report back the real counts and warnings when it's done. She can also replay one product's import and read its history end to end — its import state, which fields resolved how, and which rule or setting decided each one — and tell you exactly what happened.