Advice on dealing with 30,000 + products

[PeterJR]

I am currently offering 30,000 + products on my Actinic sites in a simple form with just part number, part description, image and price. The customer has to determine the part number required from another linked site, then search on my site to find the part number and purchase. Having recently been provided with the full data set for the product range from one of my suppliers now enables me to develop so that the whole process can take place within my site.

In the case of Spare Parts for machines the customer needs to be able to drill down via a series of drop down menues such as:

Make:
Model:
General Area of Machine1:
General area of Machine2:
General area of Machine3:?
Parts (Individual parts are not always unique to one Make and Model and may be used on others, so there are usually a number of routes to the same part)

I am looking for advice as to how best to proceed. Having been provided with the linked data in four tables I believe that I should really move to a server based product with dynamic web page generation, but not being inclined to start over is there any way that I can use Actininc to achieve a satisfactory solution?

Peter
www.forge-services.co.uk

[cdicken]

Hi Peter

The way you can set this kind of thing up is by creating attributes with choices, but then not displaying them as part of the product.

So, for each part you create an attribute called 'Make' and you create a choice for each make. You can then create another attribute called 'Model' and you create a choice for each model. But then, rather than display these choices as part of the product, you can remove the 'AttributeList' placeholder from the product layout. This won't affect adding to cart.

What you can do then is set up 'Settings | Search Settings | Searchable Properties' to allow people to search on make, model, etc. I'm not sure how you'd do the Javascript to only show a sub-set of the models if a certain make is selected, but I know these things are possible. You'd probably need to manually create the page, rather than let Actinic auto-generate it.

Hope this has given you a few ideas.