How to Display Stock Levels in Search Results

[tangerine]

I desperately need to show how many items are in stock on the search results. It is very frustrating when you bring up a list of matching search results, and the then go to the product, only to find it is out of stock.

Is there a way to get the stock level to display in the Search Results?

[wjcampbe]

Have you tried adding

We have <actinic:variable name="stocklevel" /> available

in the Search Results Layout?

[tangerine]

It doesnt work - it reports that Variable "StockLevel" is used out of context when we add it to the Search Results code. It will not let us update the site.

[wjcampbe]

OK, thought that might be the case - you could create a new variable and find a way of setting it equal to the stocklevel just before you upload your site, then try using that variable.

[dave_finlayson]

Bill,

Would you not need to make the variable available to the scripts somehow? With the page being built on the fly surely you can't get anything other than what is coded into the scripts to display on the search page????

[NormanRouxel]

The search results Perl scripts use a dedicated file containing just enough information to display what you already see in the Search Results options list. The stock level isn't there.

It might be possible to open the .cat files and extract the OUT_OF_STOCK flag so you could indicate whether the item in in stock or not. There isn't a stock level value available so it would have to be an in/out of stock message. This would require significant coding and also would require a lot of extra CPU time on the server when the results were being displayed.

Alternatively you could use some PHP on the product layouts to write an extra file containing the product ref and stock level. SearchScript.pl could then interrogate that and display the level. Again a lot of custom code needed.