Greetings ALL;
Perhpas you can help me on a project.



I want to have clients click on button that will list products from a manufacturer. Essentially, if the button is click, it will show the same result as a person using the Advance Search and filtering based on manufacturer from the drop down list.



We are running version BV5.



Please advise.



Thanks.

Nolax

Hi Aaron:
as always it seems that you are the one who is in a position to save the day. I have not gone that route as I have stayed away from dynamic categories which thought would be a potential performance issue when is performs the update. We currently have over 90,000 skus. I will look into it now that you have pointed it out.



I am still wondering what keywords are supported by search.aspx. I know that:



http://www.getfeetwet.com/search.aspx?keyword=crossbow



will do a search but but interstingly enough, the URL will do some processing and then displays the advance search but does not list the result set. It does however have the keyword value shown on the advance search keyword field and if you click on the search button it will list the result set. Perhaps, the keyword parm is not really supported but seems like the system was actually performing a search and passes parm to advance search keyword field.



I appreciate your thoughts on this.



Nolan

[quote="Aaron"]
We've actually developed an improved search that we may offer to the community.Don't want to hijack this thread but I'm all ears.

Greetings:

Just want to give an update on where we are at with the project. I revisited the dynamic category and I think it is a very viable option. I can't seem to however find an option to manually referesh all the categories at one time. I did see the dynamic category scheduling option in the Options section of the admin console which is good but still concern about the timing of the refresh.

It did however led to coding SQL to create categories programmatically and then add the productxcategory items using the feed from various vendors. This way we can just add the section of code to the batch updates we do to refresh product information. We do not have to identify what new vendors have been added by the distributor or manufacturer. I can also control the refresh or the rebuild of the whole category list.

Thanks to Aaron, we had to re-think using the category list as an approach versus search results. When you think about it, the category list will be much much more efficient specialy with a huge number of SKUs since it does not have to go through the thousands of SKUs which a search will do every time the button is clicked. If you have dozens of clients clicking the search to list product from a given manufacturer, then it can really be a resource hog. Category list just lists them without have to read through each data on sku, productname, etc.

Aaron, I would like to hear more about the search engine you have developed.

Nolan

Aarin, Thanks again