Link from Search Result to Single Product Extended Info

[wfl]

OK so now I have most if not all my products laid out in sections with a single product using an extended info page.

On my drop down menu I have 2 methods of navigating the catalog first by the menu tree and second by a menu list where the link is actually a search for a "type" search property added to each product.

The search result brings up pages of product but I would like the search result to link directly to the extended info page rather that the section page for the product.

[TraceyG]

Hi Alistair,

I'm not sure if this is possible but can I just clarify if you would also have another search that you would want to search to be different anywhere else, ie if they went to the 'advanced search' option in Actinic, before I put this to our development team?

[wfl]

Sorry Tracey I missed your response - was actually on a Hobie Cat on the Caribbean at the time

I want to create a searchable property, let us call it "Type".

Then we can assign a value to this category for each product.

So our main menu would use the "section_tree" to populate it and take the user to the appropriate section per the structure of our catalog.

The second drop down menu that would be hard coded would be a look up of the property so that the result would be all the products with the "Type" XYZ.

Finally I would like to lay out the search result in the same style as the catalog i.e. 3 column with a link to the extended information for each of the products where we already have a single product with all of the add to cart stuff.

Perhaps I could hide "Type" on the advanced search page but that is not an issue.

[TraceyG]

So it's just this 'Type' property where you want the search results to take you to the extended info page?

[wfl]

Not quite.

We want each results page to be say 3 column by perhaps 4 rows (with a more pages option) with picture and the short description (we are trimming this to 25 words in the main product area) for each product.

We would like each product in this search result to have a link to the extended info page.

This would actually be good for all searches.

While I am on the subject;
a) can I get a search to be "including" of rather than "exact" so that Type could have one or more values, i.e. "Type" = abc, 123, XYZ? Thay way the search could look for all the products with the "Type" field containing 123?
b) it would be good if we could get the search results presented randomly otherwise it is always going to favour whatever product is first in the list.

[TraceyG]

Hi Alistair,

I'm asking development if we can have the search results go to the extended info pages for you.

a) can I get a search to be "including" of rather than "exact" so that Type could have one or more values, i.e. "Type" = abc, 123, XYZ? Thay way the search could look for all the products with the "Type" field containing 123?

If you mean that you want an input box instead of a drop-down box then I think
this thread will help.

b) it would be good if we could get the search results presented randomly otherwise it is always going to favour whatever product is first in the list.

I'll check for you but I don't think it's possible (I think it may have been asked before)

[TraceyG]

Hi Alistair,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you but we've been trying a few things to get the search result display in a random order but I'm afraid we are finding that what we are trying is causing problems elsewhere (and that's never a good thing!). Also, getting the results to link directly to the extended info page is a problem too - it would take a lot of perl changes to get this working correctly because of the duplicate products.

To get the results into columns, I see that Norman has a patch that will do this so you could contact him (here's another post for someone else who asked for it)

[wfl]

Hi Tracey

Perhaps you can see the potential benefit of these enough to include them near the top of the wish list?

Maybe I can get the link to work using "info_<ProductRef>.html" so long as we don't rename any extended pages.

BTW can we change the "info.." bit of the extended info file name anywhere?

[Duncan Rounding]

The other solution of course is to have a single product per section with cut-down duplicates in other sections. You can then disable indexing of duplicates and hence will go directly to your product details from the search result.

[TraceyG]

Hi Alistair,

Perhaps you can see the potential benefit of these enough to include them near the top of the wish list?

I will add it to the wishlist for you (in fact, I already have) but these things usually get done on the basis of how popular a request it is, so there are no guarantees I'm afraid.

BTW can we change the "info.." bit of the extended info file name anywhere?

This is hard-wired into the c++ part of the program so there's nothing that can be done to change it for automatically, however, you could do a search and replace in the database (ActinicCatalog.mdb - take a backup before making any changes) - the field is 'sExtendedInfoPage' in the 'Product' table