Creating an A-Z (alphabetical) search

[Dan_Lacey]

Hi there,

I've noticed that a few people have this option so Im sure it must be possible:

Im trying to build an 'a - z' (alphabetical list) across the top of each page so that the customer can click on the letter 'A' and produce a set of all products starting with the letter 'A', click on 'B' and get similar results of all the products starting with 'B', etc.

My initial thought is that I would need to create a CUSTOMVAR which contained the first letter of the product name, ie a product called 'Apple' would have a CustomVAR of 'A', 'ant' would have a CustomVar of 'A', but product 'Beatle' would have a customvar of 'B' and so on.(sorry for labouring a point here!)

So my question is, is there a way of creating a link called 'A' that would display all the products that would have a customVAR of 'A' ? if so could someone post a link to relevant documentation or a solution below...

Or is there an alternative method of producing the results in this way?

Thanks for any help,


Dan

[jont]

Hi Dan,

CUSTOMVAR's do not quite work that way. Best to think of them as "Insert variable here" - so whenever Actinic see's a CUSTOMVAR in a template it inserts the variable specified either as a global value or against each product - if the CUSTOMVAR is not specified Actinic will ignore it.

Creating alphabetical sections is done by placing all the A's into a section called "A".. all the B's into a section called "B" etc. This can be either the master product or the duplicate. The A-Z tabs across the top are either hard coded into the template or are the section names.

[Dan_Lacey]

Creatin an alphabetical search

Thanks, jont, thats cleared that up - but made my life a little harder!

[wjcampbe]

I believe this is doable with a fragment containing calls to the search script with the alphabet letter as the anchor text. I tried it and fell foul of the text join condition. If someone from actinic can supply the missing info - the link will be something like
<a href="./cgi-bin/ss0000x.pl?=A &NOLOGIN=1>A</a> the space in the middle is where something is needed to specify the join condition.

[wjcampbe]

I went out and tried this by copying the search parameters produced by a real online search and altering the alphabetical part. (BTW my guess was wildly WRONG).

It did not work. I could not get Actinic to return a result until I specified a three letter length search term (example "Anu"). So - we need more flexibility added, please Actinic. (wishlist)

[jont]

William - cunning idea if you get it to work. Have you looked under the serach settings as I think single letters are set to ignore as default - let us know how you get on

[wjcampbe]

Jont - I failed miserably. You were almost right about the ignore as default. The lone characters are included in the "do not index" list in View| Search Conditions. But my attempts to force comparison with only the beginning of a word failed. Possibly someone like Norman Rouxel could come out with a modified ss00001 under another name that could be called instead. For now, Perl is well beyond me.