Although these two concepts are related, ILSA makes a strict distinction between sold and deleted.

Sold (sold) is a field like any other. true means the vehicle has been sold (according to the advertiser) and false means it isn’t. As with any field, you can use it in your static filters, searchable fields, fieldsets and more.

It is quite common exclude sold objects from your site. Having a static filter that rejects objects with sold equals true will do so.
If however, you’d like to keep sold objects online for a couple of days after they’ve been sold, use a static filter on metadata.days_sold instead.

TIP

Sometimes an advertiser tries to circumvent your static filter by not marking an object as sold (leaving sold to false) and instead uses other ways to show the object has been sold. For example by adding a banner to the image, or adding “SOLD!” to general.type.raw. ILSA has an optional module that can detect this using OCR on the image and still reject those objects from your site. Contact us for more information.

You can also mark objects as sold yourself if the object has been sold through your platform. Doing so will set metadata.has_sold to true and notify the VMS of the advertiser. The VMS or advertiser might react to that by marking the vehicle as sold, and only then sold will be affected. So you will likely want a static filter on metadata.has_sold as well.

An object in ILSA gets deleted in a couple of ways:

  1. The advertiser no longer wishes to advertise the object, most commonly after the object has been sold
  2. The object no longer adheres to the static filters (for example the filter on sold)
  3. You deleted the object or advertiser in the backoffice or Hexon API

Once an object has been deleted, it will no longer be part of the dataset and as such will no longer be included in the API responses like /dropdowncontents and /searchresults. The /vehicle call will return an HTTP 404.

ILSA can be configured to retain deleted objects for a while, for example 30 days. This can help you prevent dead links on your site. Doing so will still exclude the deleted objects from /dropdowncontents and /searchresults, but the /vehicle call will keep working. The API response will include "deleted": true to let you know this object is no longer available and you can act accordingly. For example by showing the user something like “This BMW is no longer available. Here are some other BMW’s you might be interested in”.