Cross-link products and categories?

[maffpunton]

Hi!

Whats the est way to cross-link categories and products? I have several sub-cats which need to be in two categories. While I'm at it, what's the best way to have products in more than one category/sub-cat? All without duplication.

Thanks.

[cdicken]

Right - I'm afraid this isn't possible. The only way to have a product in two sections is to use duplicates. This is what the feature has been designed for.

What you can do for the sub-sections is to create a 'false' section link - which is a fragment that contains a link to a particular section in the store. You can edit the layout of these to make them look like standard section links.

[maffpunton]

The only way to have a product in two sections is to use duplicates

But what about stock monitoring? Does that mean that if I have 20 products in I have to put, say 10 on each? But what if the duplicate in one category runs out... people will think we're out of stock.

Good idea about the fragment... hadn't thought of that!

[cdicken]

Duplicate products share the same stock record - you'll be fine. Just right click on a product and select 'New Product Duplicate'

[maffpunton]

Ah! Excellent! Thanks again Chris!

[Simon TL]

Generating from a database

Hi

Just checking that this is ok...

I am building a CD store; categories are 'Genres' so one CD may come under more than one genre. My existing data is in an Access database - with many-to-many tables from genre to CD. I have written VBA to directly load the CD data to the Actinic database.

Is the only difference between the 'primary' product record and these duplicates, the n! in front of the Product Reference? So PR 45 has duplicates 1!45 and 2!45?

And am I storing up trouble for myself with this route?! It may be that this is a temporary loading method; I can see that the advantage of using Actinic for product management is that the original database will no longer be needed.

Thanks...

[Simon TL]

Answering (part of) my question!

It looks as if I also have to set:

nProductType to 1 rather than 0
sOriginalProdRef to the parent rather than null
nDuplicateIndex to 1 rather than -1

[wjcampbe]

nDuplicateIndex will increment -1 is the original, then 1, 2, 3 etc

[Simon TL]

nDuplicateIndex

Bill

Do you mean nDuplicateIndex increments like the n! bit of the product ref?

abc -1
1!abc 1
2!abc 2

etc?

[Nadeem]

Hi there

Yes Simon that is right.

Kind Regards

[Simon TL]

Thanks

Thanks for that!