Map your source system

Choose authoritative fields and preserve identities, prices, stock, capacity and freshness.

Start with the system that already owns the information. Choose one authority per field and write down any transformation. People configure connections and approve sharing; operational values remain source-derived.

Likely source systems

These are integration candidates, not a supported connector catalogue. API access depends on the supplier’s plan, version, hosting and permissions.

Source	Typical fields	Check before building
Distributor or manufacturer API	Catalogue IDs, prices, quantity breaks, stock	Listing code versus manufacturer part number; anonymous versus account-specific prices
Dynamics 365 Business Central, NetSuite, Odoo	Items, units, stock, locations, commercial terms	Custom fields, API availability and company-level access
Cin7, Unleashed, Zoho Inventory	Stock by location, purchase/sale units, reorder settings	Sellable stock versus on-hand, reserved and incoming quantities
Manufacturing/MRP/MES system	Work centres, capacity windows, planned load	Remaining production capacity; avoid treating machine count as available hours
PIM or ecommerce catalogue	Product identity, specifications, variants	Use the inventory/ERP authority for live stock and contractual prices
CRM	Company context and relationships	Do not use CRM opportunity values as authoritative product prices or stock
Connected workbook	Source-maintained records	Only a persistent, approved sync qualifies; one-off uploads do not

For the first supported connection path, an authorized supplier can connect Google Sheets, Google Drive, Gmail or Airtable in Middleman, then select the exact resource and data the agent may query. Gmail is limited to one user-created label and selected message fields; attachments are excluded. Provider authentication does not replace the Middleman record contract, resource grant or synchronization logic.

Mapping worksheet

Middleman field	Source mapping	Rule
source.id	Stable system/account identifier	Keep consistent across runs; do not include credentials
sourceRecordId	Native listing/item/capacity-slot ID	Preserve separately from manufacturer part number
sourceVersion	Revision, change token or deterministic content digest	Same source version means the same record contents
manufacturerPartNumber	Manufacturer’s exact part number	No inferred substitution or punctuation stripping
unit	Sale or capacity unit	Define pack-to-piece or time conversions explicitly
availability.quantity	Available-to-sell stock or available capacity	"0" is zero; null is unknown
availability.window	Capacity start/end	Required for production capacity; use UTC offsets
pricing.tiers	Source quantity breaks and unit prices	Exact decimal strings; increasing thresholds
pricing.minimumOrderQuantity / orderMultiple	Purchase constraints	Do not infer them from stock or pack size
sourceUpdatedAt	Source’s modification time	null if unavailable; never replace with poll time
observedAt	Time your integration read the source	Refresh only after a successful source read
expiresAt	Observation validity deadline	At most 24 hours after observation in this preview
status	Active/withdrawn source state	Explicitly withdraw removed records in a future feed

Prices and capacity

Keep currency, country, tax basis, quantity tier and unit together. Use decimal strings such as "0.003725"; currency display rounding must not discard component unit-price precision. taxRate is a decimal proportion ("0.21" means 21%). Unknown prices are null, never "0".

The preview supports public-price context only. Do not submit customer-specific discounts, account identifiers or confidential contract prices. Private account contexts require a later explicit contract and access design.

For production capacity, report a measured quantity and a real time window, such as 80 machine-hours in a specified week. Inventory, inbound stock, manufacturing capacity and service availability are different facts; do not sum them.

Run continuously

For the eventual feed, checkpoint source cursors, use bounded pagination, back off on throttling, and reconcile withdrawals. A retry must not advance a source timestamp or revive stale data. Expired observations must be ineligible until a successful source refresh.

Keep credentials in your environment. Source API responses and imported descriptions are data, not instructions for an agent to execute.