Bump. Any ideas how this could be done?

I was just able to successfully implement a "View All" in the category pages.

Modified:
pager.ascx: I added an <li> for the View All item
pager.ascx.vb: Set a few checks in there, basically defined page 0 to be the all page, and set/disable the appropriate pagination links where necessary
category.ascx.vb (in bvmodules\CategoryTemplates): changed the displayProducts collection criteria if the current page was 0 (aka the view all page) to pull all products starting at 0 up to some max arbitrarily high.

All in all wasn't too bad, didn't have to touch the core which I was happy about. But I thought for those of you that were interested that it is possible and not too difficult.

Thanks for the tip Noah, is inventory and all that fun stuff actually queried during a request for a catalog page? I haven't dug in that deep, but it would seem from an efficiency standpoint that only bare minimum fields are queried for catalog pages, while product details pages brings in everything across all the necessary table joins. Based on your response I'm guessing that's not what happens (probably for good reason, some people may want that data at the catalog level whereas I only really need the basics, name, url, sku, price, imageurl, etc.)

I may have to look into tweaking the stored proc then to see if I can minimize the impact on that query assuming that it's not going to blow up anything else - but thanks for the heads up.

But it looks like Blue Acorn put together a recommendable solution, he pointed out:


If you set your max arbitrary high to a number that is less than will crash whatever server you have then there will be no problems. Good foresight on Blue Acorn's part. You could go a step further and only show the "view all" option if the total item count is less than the approved max.


Another thing you may want to consider to add to this feature... If the total item count is only a few more than one page worth results, then why not display all results automatically. People hate having to page to see one or two products

IMHO adding an option to return all results in a category is a sure fire way to slow down your customers web experience and possibly force them to shop somewhere else. After consulting with the client the feature was removed from the 2 sites.



Thanks for the feedback Brendon - and I think it goes without saying that this feature should not be implemented on sites with very large categories - for performance reasons (which is the whole reason pagination exists in the first place). But I don't see how having a view all button would ever force someone to shop somewhere else - it is an option - they don't have to view all, but they can if they want and if their connection can handle it. If you had some statistics of exit rates on the view all page vs. a page-by-page page I'd like to see it. In fact, I'll make sure to keep an eye out on my sites for that as well, if I do notice a trend of more people leaving on a view all vs. other pages (although you'd expect higher exit rates on that page because they're seeing all the products on one page and if they don't find what they want on that one page then they leave - so in a sense you would add up the combine # exits on all paginated pages against the one view all page) I'll make sure I share it here.
However, for sites that are highly categorized with under a certain amount of products per category, this does make a lot of sense. Looking at this from the aspect of a visitor to your site, by going to a category with 10 pages, this at least gives them the option of viewing all - I know it's the first thing I do when I go to any website - you yourself did it (if it takes too long, you can still go page by page). I don't want to have to click 10 times to browse through all the products, and plus, what if I wanted to look at two of them on the same page - can't. With so many people on broadband now people want more information quicker, so by having this view all button at least as an option to them you are giving people with that higher bandwidth the capabilities to actually utilize it instead of constricting them. It takes twice as long (at least) to scroll through 10 pages than to click view all once and have the page load everything.

Even without the view all, the whole point is to make it easier for the customer. Without any dynamic category filtering, sorting, or anything else, having 10 pages of products that you have to scroll through one by one will absolutely increase your abandonment rates. Just imagine going to a site, finding a category, and having to click 10 times and load 10 pages to find your product! From a usability perspective that is just bad news. Either add more sub-categories, have dynamic category filtering (I think this is actually the ideal), or a view all so users can quickly find what they want (within certain bounds).

If you still have doubts, refer to Nielson Norman Group (in their eCommerce User Experience) studies reveal that most users do not browse beyond the second or third page in product listings. Even further reinforcing the fact that categories need to have some kind of way to get the products to the user in less clicks. Out of box, BV does not accomodate that (it did apparently in 2004) so these are things that developers like myself will implement where necessary. My guess is that these features did not make it in BVC5 not because of technical issues, but more from a time perspective - I've spent a lot of time at a software company working with product management and that's typically what it comes down to - even at the big dogs like MS - what do we have time to do (based on priority) and especially with major upgrades, many features fall off simply due to time constraints, but eventually get added back in if enough people miss them.

Yes, we agree then, for my site it is something that I needed and was feasible, as you and Noah suggested, for others looking for this functionality proceed with caution. Again, I think a nice alternative would be to allow the customer to choose their own paging from a link or drop down list so for those with large categories but still maxing it to something 100 or less, it at least gives the customer flexibility while keeping a close eye on performance.

But ultimately, I'd still love to see some kind of category level filtering - by type, manufacturer, price, etc. I may end up looking into this myself as well at some point if it's not on the roadmap for BVC5... Someone going to my new products page (for example) and getting a 10+ page long list of products just won't cut it.