Searching Only Sections

[keno]

Is it possible to place a search drop down box in each toplevel section page, which would only search the products under that toplevel section tree? If so, how would I approach it?

For example, if I need to find a HP printer cartridge. I can use a drop down in the HP toplevel section page which references only HP printer models. Actually, I would have to have two or more drop down boxes - one for HP Laser Printers, the other for HP Inkjet Printers(Or broken up into Deskjet, Designjet, Officejet etc.).

In reading about searchable custom properties and playing around with Actinic 7, it seems like I can only search from one defined search page. This is fine for some sites, but in this case I would have too many drop down boxes if I put them all in one page.

Any ideas on this?

Thanks - Keno

[keno]

Well, I don't know how I missed that big section in the AUG about using search tools. But after reading it and before I head back to the minefield, I have three questions:

When I run a search, a list is returned and needs another click. How do I get the search to return a product or group of products that I can buy?

After I click on a product from my search result list, all the products in the same section are returned. How do I limit this to return only the searched items.

I'm wondering how I can limit the search to drill down only through one section? Maybe I can modify and hard code search parameters from "Allow Searching By Sections" code.

BTW I am currently using product attributes and custom properties for searching. So my product is a Printer Cartridge, and searchable attributes are printer models.

Thanks-Keno

[NormanRouxel]

I'm afraid none of the things you want are possible. Actinic generates static HTML pages containing the products, and that's the only place you can buy them from.

If such functionality is essential to you then you should be looking to other e-commerce packages, that operate via a server-side product database.

[keno]

Thanks for the reply Norman.

That's very interesting. So it seems the search first returns a list, because the static pages may be in different sections.

The search capabilities are interesting to understand but not essential for my needs.

[NormanRouxel]

Yep. You've got it. The search returns a list of pointers to various static HTML pages that contain the product(s) (amongst others) that match.