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Home > Archive > Commerce Server Catalog > October 2006 > variants nightmare
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variants nightmare
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| Dave Marini 2006-10-11, 1:20 pm |
| It's me again, with another catalog question. I want to say that if this
wasn't my first time using any CS platform, I wouldn't have so many
questions, but it's so complex that I doubt that would be true. I have a
product with 3 variant properties. Each of these variant properties is
represented as an enumeration property, or "Multiple Choice" in the Catalog
Schema Manager UI App, because they have some finite choices that are to be
decided by the business. Here's the thing:
In the CS2002 book I read, it's preferred to display each variant in it's
own dropdown for the user, and then concatenate the unique selectedValues
from each of the dropdowns to form the correct variantId that can be easily
and efficiently retrieved from the productFamily by using GetVariant() or
some other simple means. But how can they achieve this if the multiple
choice properties in CS don't support name/value pairs, but only display
names? Any tips from someone who's done this on some schema tips to handle
multiple variant properties that contain more than 1 possible choice? Is
this something I'll need custom join tables for?
Any tips would be appreciated,
Dave
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| Joseph Johnson 2006-10-12, 7:25 am |
| Dave,
This sort of thing would be interested in the following example.
Say you have a Product "Shirt" with the ProductID of "Shirt".
Let's say shirts can be sold to both men and women. Additionally, shirts
might be sold in two colors red and blue.
So, when constructing the VariantIDs for this, you'd actually have something
like
"Mens_Red"
"Mens_Blue"
"Womens_Red"
"Womens_Blue"
In this example, you could have one combo box with gender, and another combo
box with color, and the concatenating the two would give you the appropriate
VariantID.
My understanding from your post is that you want a better description of the
variant substring in the drop down menu (IE: a one word description isn't
going to do the job). If that's the case, then I'm guessing you might have
to develop some sort of SQL "lookup" table which maps one word from the
Variant ID to a more robust description. It gets really complicated when
you chain a bunch of variant properties together, but it's completely
manageable.
Joe
"Dave Marini" <DaveMarini@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:A7048254-07EA-4B25-B59A-CC9ADFAAC5F3@microsoft.com...
> It's me again, with another catalog question. I want to say that if this
> wasn't my first time using any CS platform, I wouldn't have so many
> questions, but it's so complex that I doubt that would be true. I have a
> product with 3 variant properties. Each of these variant properties is
> represented as an enumeration property, or "Multiple Choice" in the
> Catalog
> Schema Manager UI App, because they have some finite choices that are to
> be
> decided by the business. Here's the thing:
>
> In the CS2002 book I read, it's preferred to display each variant in it's
> own dropdown for the user, and then concatenate the unique selectedValues
> from each of the dropdowns to form the correct variantId that can be
> easily
> and efficiently retrieved from the productFamily by using GetVariant() or
> some other simple means. But how can they achieve this if the multiple
> choice properties in CS don't support name/value pairs, but only display
> names? Any tips from someone who's done this on some schema tips to
> handle
> multiple variant properties that contain more than 1 possible choice? Is
> this something I'll need custom join tables for?
>
> Any tips would be appreciated,
>
> Dave
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| Dave Marini 2006-10-12, 7:26 pm |
| Joe,
Thanks for your reply. This solution would work in most cases but our
business unit requires the ability to update a variant combo at runtime. and
since the VariantIds are read only after creation, a variant combo of
Womens_Red when I changed the combo to be Blue will not be found using the
concatenation of the values. This is why I was hoping for an ID. I did find
a workaround although I am concerned about it's efficiency when the number of
products in the catalog gets to be high. I'm currently using a CatalogSearch
to return ProductVariantClass types and setting the SqlWhereClause to a set
of VariantPropertyName=SelectedValue criteria and returning the one that gets
found.
Thanks again for the response,
Dave
"Joseph Johnson" wrote:
> Dave,
>
> This sort of thing would be interested in the following example.
>
> Say you have a Product "Shirt" with the ProductID of "Shirt".
>
> Let's say shirts can be sold to both men and women. Additionally, shirts
> might be sold in two colors red and blue.
>
> So, when constructing the VariantIDs for this, you'd actually have something
> like
>
> "Mens_Red"
> "Mens_Blue"
> "Womens_Red"
> "Womens_Blue"
>
> In this example, you could have one combo box with gender, and another combo
> box with color, and the concatenating the two would give you the appropriate
> VariantID.
>
> My understanding from your post is that you want a better description of the
> variant substring in the drop down menu (IE: a one word description isn't
> going to do the job). If that's the case, then I'm guessing you might have
> to develop some sort of SQL "lookup" table which maps one word from the
> Variant ID to a more robust description. It gets really complicated when
> you chain a bunch of variant properties together, but it's completely
> manageable.
>
> Joe
>
> "Dave Marini" <DaveMarini@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:A7048254-07EA-4B25-B59A-CC9ADFAAC5F3@microsoft.com...
>
>
>
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