Search problems and refinement

[Barry]

Hi guys,

Can anyone help with these niggely little problems Ive got with the search feature please? using V8 developer

1 Plurals problem. When someone searches our site for "hoodies" or "hoodys" they dont see any results as ours are called "Rolling Stones hoodie" or something similar, is there a way around this?

2 Price based searching problem; When enabled we are forced to use a value from £0 to £12.99 (the lowest price product) but when you use this the results list all of the dummy, zero priced and not for sale products that we have used as section headers on all the product pages, is there an easy way to exclude these dummy products from the search results? (we have over 1500 sections and dummy products!)

3 Rogue attributes in drop down list when using the Search by Attribute feature; We have size options for all products (tshirts and hoodies), small, medium, large, Xlarge etc - When we use the search by size feature, the drop down list shows messy variants that I dont now how to tidy up, eg the list shows;
small
Small
medium
Medium
and so on, with over 4000 products I need a way to find all those case variants and change all the 'Small's to all 'small's and so on, if you see what I mean!

If anyone could take a stab at just one of those problems it would make my day and save me days of agony inducing manual labour!

thanks in advance guys :-)

Barry

[Rich Brady]

1) Have you searched the forum for your plurals problem? There's plenty on this already.

http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=45112

2) You should have used Fragments, not Products to head a section

3) Search the database in Access or Equivalent

[Barry]

Hiya

Thanks for the tips, helped a lot :-)

1 That thread has faulty info, the fix doesnt work, still looking for some way to help desperate seekers of 'hoodies' to connect with our multitude of "hoodie"

2 Cant despute your logic there, but whats done is done (upgrades since V4 - No fragments then) So i need a solution other than converting all those to fragments (yuk!) - So far ive tried setting the Templates of the dummy product to use "No Layout" as the price layout, thinking that this might remove its current £0.00 price status but no joy. These 'products still apear listed in the results for all products under £12. Nasty confusion for all.

Im going to try removing all reference to Price from the template for these dummy products and see if that stops Actinic treating these as having a price, this will take many hours though, (snaphot 90 mins+, site refresh 2 hours+) any other ideas meanwhile very very welcome!

3 This was great, using Open Office though and little experience of Db work, so i just searced for the offending 'Small' and 'Large' attributes, (case sensitive search) noted the Product Ref No and then edited the product directly in Actinic. Amazing that with over 6000 products all copied and pasted, that somehow one got through with an 'S' instead of an 's' and it ruined the effectiveness of the advanced search, for years! So thanks again for that one.

I hope this helps other searchers

G'day folks

Barry

[Duncan Rounding]

Hiya

Thanks for the tips, helped a lot :-)

1 That thread has faulty info, the fix doesnt work, still looking for some way to help desperate seekers of 'hoodies' to connect with our multitude of "hoodie"....

Take another look at the thread the mod should say Search.pm not SearchScript.pl

[Barry]

I was just about to reply to that one, thanks again D, im uploading now, fingers crossed, ill post back the results

[Rich Brady]

Cant despute your logic there, but whats done is done (upgrades since V4 - No fragments then) So i need a solution other than converting all those to fragments (yuk!) - So far ive tried setting the Templates of the dummy product to use "No Layout" as the price layout, thinking that this might remove its current £0.00 price status but no joy. These 'products still apear listed in the results for all products under £12. Nasty confusion for all.

If you create a product level variable (True/False) you may be able to manually remove those dummy products from appearing.

If you don't know much about Variables and/or Blocks it could take you a while to trawl through the forum for the info you need and the testing.

[NormanRouxel]

So i need a solution other than converting all those to fragments (yuk!)

Did you try unchecking the "Can Be Ordered Online" on these dummy products.

If that doesn't help then converting to Fragments may be your only solution.

Note that both product and Fragments are held in the same Product table in the database. The only differences is that nProductType is 0 for a Product and 2 for a Fragment (nContentcategory seems to be different too - 2 for a Product and 6 for a Fragment). And you'd need to copy the title, image and text from the Product related fields to the Fragment ones.

[Barry]

Thanks Norman,

The "Can Be Ordered Online" is unchecked on all, no joy. Ive also now removed all references to price from the dummy template, no joy still.

Probably easiest to drop the Price based search for now which is a great shame. We are planning to upgrade from V8 to V10 soon so perhaps this will either solve it, or we may tackle it then.

Thanks for the database edit tip Norman, that looks both very scary and the way to go at the same time! (grimace)

Much obliged, as ever

thanks guys

PS Can i suggest that the search.pm refinement go in as standard? Its a great patch and the system doesnt work too well without it

Barry