Sophisticated searching via formats?

[wykbooks]

I am just beginning to trial Actinic Business for a site selling antiquarian books. Each product would have a product-name of, probably, the book’s author and title (assuming any character limit for this is pretty large) and the product description would be a composite field made up of publisher, year, general description, condition, etc details.

I understand it is possible to use html to format different elements of the product description in different ways, so that for example in the product-name the author details could be red and the book-title in blue and in the product-description the general description could be in roman and the publisher in italics (or perhaps a different font-size?)

My question is : would it be possible (and not too complex) to link these different formats to search-boxes in order to produce a more sophisticated search capability than is usual ? So that, the customer would be given three search-boxes for , say author, title and publisher to enter his search-terms in, and if he entered “Kipling” in the author-box and “Macmillan” in the publisher-box the only hits would be those where Kipling appeared in the (red) author-element and Macmillan appeared in the (italic) publisher-element (and not the other way round!)

If this idea doesn’t work is there an alternative way of achieving the same result?

Apologies if the answer is already somewhere on the forum and I have missed it.

wykbooks

[NormanRouxel]

Look at custom properties. This is all built-in to business.

You create these in Advanced / Custom Properties. You can have one for Author, one for Title, another for Year, etc. As you're using Business these can be made fiully searchable. Lets say you've created one called AUTHOR. Now in a Product's Details / Advanced / Properties you tick the + sign and Select the Author entry. You can now enter your Author name, and check Searchable and Use as Customvar.

Go into View / Search Settings and you'll have a tab for Searchable Properties. You can choose which properties to search on here. Choose AUTHOR and any others you've made.
Now in your Product Template you can have some HTML like

<font color=red>CUSTOMVAR:AUTHOR</font>

Do the same for your other fields with whatever colouring/formatting you desire and you now have ways to search on Author, Title, Year, etc.

Actinics built-in Help also has plenty of information on doing this. Look in the index for "Custom Properties".


Norman

[wykbooks]

Very many thanks for this – it is exactly the searching capability I want.

However, from the explanation in Actinic Help, it seems that the Custom Property values (for Author, title etc would need to be individually entered, which would be problematical for several thousand books. Is there any way of importing these elements directly into the Custom Property values from my existing database (which will be generating the product descriptions) where they are separate fields ?

[Jan]

If you already have this data in a digital form then you could generate the keywords and names from that into an import file for Actinic.

Regards,

[NormanRouxel]

You can Import these Custom Property fields if you use the Hierarchical Import. You can't do this with Flat File import (although I believe it's on the Wish List). Again, Actinic's Help will explain more.

Norman

[wykbooks]

Many thanks Jan and Norman - things will now go quiet for a while as I immerse myself in the Hierarchical Import sections of the Help!

[NormanRouxel]

In case you didn't know. Actinic installs some example HierarchiCal Import Files into your Site1 folder. Look for SampleHierarchicalBusinessImportFile.txt for example.

Norman

[wykbooks]

Thanks again – I have just been browsing that and also the example-hierarchy.csv provided under the Database Structuring thread. All the data needed to populate the fields for the import could readily be created or extracted from my existing MS Aceess database, but I confess I am struggling so far as to how I would export from Access so as to arrive at the (as it seems to me strange) format required for the spreadsheet to import to Actinic. If the custom property values, section categories etc were just additional fields in each product description line it would be very straightforward, but I don’t yet see an easy way of creating the import file. (However I do have 27 days of the free trial left!)

[Jan]

You would probably have to write a program to do it - you can use VBA (much like visual basic) from access.

Regards,