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Jamie
Starting Member

United Kingdom
16 Posts

Posted - August 01 2005 :  14:24:34  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Hi Support,

We bought version 5.5 toward the end of last year, and I am only now scratching the surface on what this great product offer us - bring on version 6!

One feature I'm desperate for, is a mechanism for controlling the precise sort order of products and categories. I appreciate that you have a name/code field we can use, but it is impossible had a naming/coding structure that displays products in the order you want across different categories!

Would it be possible to include a numerical value for each product, in each category to control the display. This would allow precise control, as some products look better placed below another etc - I think many other customer shops would also benefit from this degree of display control.

I've attempted to write this into your code myself, with partial success, but it is time consuming process and I've had duplicate products appearing - although this now seems to be sorted!

Many thanks

Jamie

pmarsh
Starting Member

United Kingdom
8 Posts

Posted - September 16 2005 :  06:03:58  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Why not use one of the "other" fields in the product table then update the "xsortproducts" variable?

Edited by - pmarsh on September 16 2005 06:10:21
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Jamie
Starting Member

United Kingdom
16 Posts

Posted - September 27 2005 :  11:26:26  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Hi,

Yes, it would be possible to use one of the other fields in the product table, but if the product in question appeared in more than one category this method would fall down, as the "order field" would remain the same for all categories? I'm looking for a precise method for controlling the exact order of products display in every category.

thanks

Jamie

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devshb
Senior Member

United Kingdom
1904 Posts

Posted - September 30 2005 :  04:42:03  Show Profile  Visit devshb's Homepage  Reply with Quote
there is a problem though; that even if you got the products listed in prodcategories order then you'd either get duplicate products (because a product can be in more than one category branch, as well as at each level of each branch) or they'd show up in a seemingly irrelevant order when doing searches. Somehow you'd need to specify which of the categories the product should be ordering by as you can't order by multiple prodcategories records on a single product (ie it just doesn't make logical sense)

I know what you're getting at though; I reckon that pmarsh's suggestion is the best one, because unless you're querying a specific category (and not doing a general search by price, name etc) then ordering by prodcategories wouldn't be possible or make sense. I'd just use a column like pother1 if I were in your shoes, as per pmarsh's suggestion.

You could do something more complex, like seeing which categories (if any) the user is doing a search on, and then dynamically change the ordering logic, but that'd be pretty complex.

There is something similar which we do for some vpasp sites. It's not related to product searching/ordering, but it does illustrate the problem.....

To help split product images up into smaller sets and to keep things flexible, we sometimes implement "category-based product image location" which is where you can specify just the image filename (not the path/directory) in the product, and then the system will automatically look for the images in the relevant "images/products/[categoryximagefoldername]" folder when displaying them on the product pages, so you can rename/move your image folders without having to change your product info etc.

As per your ordering problem, a product can be in more than one category branch, and at more than one level in any given branch, so we needed to stamp the products with the "categoryid to use for image-locations" value, so we added another column to products and used a poplist on the edit-products screen for it.

Simon Barnaby
Developer
[email protected]
www.BigYellowZone.com
Web Design, Online Marketing and VPASP addons

Edited by - devshb on September 30 2005 04:50:30

Edited by - devshb on September 30 2005 04:51:34
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greatphoto
VP-CART Super User

USA
304 Posts

Posted - October 19 2005 :  20:52:02  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
quote:

Yes, it would be possible to use one of the other fields in the product table, but if the product in question appeared in more than one category this method would fall down, as the "order field" would remain the same for all categories?



Hi Jamie-

This is really no problem at all. We do it all the time on our site.

The trick is just to not use consecutive numbers. Its a good idea to space them out anyway in case you decide to add more products later and want them to sort in between existing products. Here's an example:

Say you have a product called "Not-so-mushy Apples." You want them to show up after "drippy oranges" in the fruit category, but you want them first in the specials category. No problem. Assign "drippy oranges" a sort order of 20 and assign "Not-so-mushy Apples" a sort order value of 40. Make sure all other entries in the specials category have a value greater than 40. With some trial an error, you can get this to work pretty well as long as you aren't trying to do something really complex.

Of course, it won't work at all if you want oranges ahead of apples in one category and vise versa in a different category.

(see also: http://www.vpasp.com/virtprog/vpaspforum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2893)

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greatphoto
VP-CART Super User

USA
304 Posts

Posted - October 19 2005 :  20:57:25  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
quote:

...we sometimes implement "category-based product image location" which is where you can specify just the image filename (not the path/directory) in the product, and then the system will automatically look for the images in the relevant "images/products/[categoryximagefoldername]" folder...



That's an interesting idea for other applications! Could be used for a lot of different things other than images...

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Jamie
Starting Member

United Kingdom
16 Posts

Posted - November 12 2005 :  00:31:00  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Hi All!

Sorry for the delay in replying, I've not been back to the forum until the last couple of days.

Yes, every suggestion is a possible workaround and I'd previously tried greatphoto suggestion of not using consecutive numbers but as he quite rightly says the method falls down if the same product needs to be placed in a different order in different catagories.

Ultimately, as devshb says my request is a difficult one due to the way the vpasp shop works - but it would still be nice to have! I'm from a JShop Pro environment, and whilst I appreciate it was not a asp maintained product, it was an MSAccess database backend and it control on product/category sequencing was superb.

Many thanks for all your replies

Jamie


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