Content Selection Framework - APIs for Virtual catalogs

Author

APIs for Virtual catalogs

SampathTangudu

2005-01-25, 7:48 am

I have noticed that for product ids in virtual catalog ,the base catalog
name is associated in brackets.

I have situations like ---a product id is associated as a featured product
for a particular category. In that situation if we are using virtual
catalog, we are required to update the base catalog name to the product
ids explicitly for getting the product details of that product.

Is there any other way to get around this problem other than explicitly
updating the base catalog name to the product id?

Please let me know about the things to be noted when using virtual catalog
APIs.(ie somtimes I will be using virtual catalog and sometimes base
catalog for accessing data based on the user logged in.Is there any change
needs to be done in the code while doing this association dynamically.)

Vinayak Tadas[MSFT]

2005-01-26, 5:54 pm

Since a virtual catalog can contain products from multiple base catalogs we
munge the productid of the product in the base catalog with the base
catalog name. This is done to handle the case of products from different
base catalogs having the same productid. Suppose that you have a product
with the ProductId 'P1' in a base catalog 'C1' and a product with the
productid 'P1' in another base catalog 'C2' and let's say you include both
the catalogs in a virtual catalog then the products in the virtual catalog
will have the product ids P1(C1) and P1(C2). The same goes for categories
also.
When using a virtual catalog one thing you need to do when calling
GetProduct method is to pass the productid in the form
ProductId(BAseCatalgoName) . Similary when calling GetCategory the
categoryname should be passed in the form CategoryName(BaseCatalogName).

--------------------
From: "SampathTangudu" <sampath_tangudu@nospam.yahoo.co.in>
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.commerceserver.campaigns_csf
Subject: APIs for Virtual catalogs
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 04:30:00 -0500
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I have noticed that for product ids in virtual catalog ,the base catalog
name is associated in brackets.

I have situations like ---a product id is associated as a featured product
for a particular category. In that situation if we are using virtual
catalog, we are required to update the base catalog name to the product
ids explicitly for getting the product details of that product.

Is there any other way to get around this problem other than explicitly
updating the base catalog name to the product id?

Please let me know about the things to be noted when using virtual catalog
APIs.(ie somtimes I will be using virtual catalog and sometimes base
catalog for accessing data based on the user logged in.Is there any change
needs to be done in the code while doing this association dynamically.)

Thanks
Vinayak Tadas
Microsoft
http://blogs.msdn.com/vinayakt

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