Transforming Your Feed: the Catalog Workspace

The catalog workspace is where you fix and shape a product feed before it reaches your ads — across five tabs, all editing one draft. Nothing reprocesses or reaches a channel until you Publish.

Updated July 25, 2026

Renable's catalog workspace is where you fix and shape a product feed before it reaches your ads. Its five tabs — Activity, Data sources, Rules, Mapping, and Settings — each handle one part of that work. Every edit stays in a draft, and nothing reprocesses or reaches a channel until you Publish.

What the catalog workspace is#

A catalog is one product feed source — the feed Renable imports, cleans up, and hands to your channels. The catalog workspace is where you do the cleaning and shaping: rename columns, fix bad values, drop products you can't advertise, join in extra data, and line everything up with the fields ad networks expect.

Open a catalog from your project's Catalogs list. It opens on the Activity tab, and the five tabs run across the top. For how a feed gets connected in the first place, see Working with catalogs.

The five tabs of the catalog workspace#

Each tab owns one part of shaping your feed:

  • Activity — the catalog's home. See what each import did, read any warnings, and trace how a single product's values were produced, step by step. See Feed runs and warnings.
  • Data sources — where your feeds live: your product feed, plus any auxiliary feeds or mapping tables you bring in for extra data like stock levels or category translations. See Joining another feed.
  • Rules — conditions plus actions that clean and reshape your data: when a product matches a condition, set a field, remove one, exclude the product, split it into variants, or group products together. A rule can also apply a ruleset — a set of rules you maintain in one place and share across catalogs. See Fixing your feed data with rules and Working with rulesets.
  • Mapping — lining your feed columns up with the catalog fields channels expect, so your feed's title column feeds the Title field, your price column feeds Price, and so on. See Mapping your feed fields.
  • Settings — the catalog's name and feed-level options: how numbers and dates in your feed are read, the store domain, and connecting a review source.

Your changes stay in one draft until you Publish#

This is the concept everything else rests on. The whole catalog workspace edits a single draft. Everything you change — a rule, a field mapping, a joined feed, a setting on any tab — is saved to that one shared draft as you go. Nothing reprocesses, and no channel or ad sees any of it, until you Publish.

While you have unsaved work, the app bar shows "Unpublished changes" alongside the Publish button. Publishing shows you a sampled preview of what will change first, so you can confirm before it goes live.

"Import now" uses your last published configuration, not your draft#

This is the one thing that trips people up. An import always runs against your last published configuration — never your unpublished draft. So editing a rule and clicking Import now does not show the rule's effect, because the import ignores the draft.

Import now sits in the health strip at the top of the catalog page, above the tabs. If you have unpublished changes and click it, Renable warns you — "Importing now uses your last published configuration — your current edits won't be applied until you publish" — and offers three choices:

  • Cancel — don't import.
  • Import anyway — import using the last published configuration; your draft edits are ignored.
  • Publish & import — publish your draft first, then import with your new edits applied.

So when you've been editing and want to see your changes take effect, choose Publish & import (or publish, then import). If you only want fresh data without applying draft edits, Import anyway is fine.

Revert throws away your draft edits#

To abandon everything in the current draft and go back to what's live, use Revert. Renable confirms first — "Your current draft changes will be saved to history, then reset to match the published configuration." Your draft is saved to history before it's cleared, so a revert isn't unrecoverable, but it does undo every unpublished change across all five tabs at once, not just the tab you're on.

Rules and Mapping: the two ways you change feed data#

Most feed fixes come down to one of two tools, and they work differently:

  • Rules change values conditionally — they act only on the products whose conditions match. Use a rule to fix a mislabeled category, drop out-of-stock products, or strip prohibited wording from titles. See Fixing your feed data with rules.
  • Mapping decides which feed column feeds which catalog field — the plumbing that connects your feed's structure to the fields channels require. See Mapping your feed fields.

You'll often use both: mapping to point the right columns at the right fields, then rules to clean up the values flowing through them.

Two rule actions do something different again: they change how many products you have, not their values. Splitting variants into products turns one feed row into several, and Grouping products brings rows that share a group key together — to add values computed across the whole group, or to keep just one product per group.

Or ask Aimée#

You don't have to work through the tabs yourself. Describe what you want in plain language — "point my feed at this URL," "exclude everything that's out of stock," or "map my category column to Google's categories" — and Aimée can set the feed source, edit the rules and mapping, join another feed, and publish for you once you approve.

Where to go next#