Advance Search Question (heeeeeeelp)

[asylum]

OK this is a bit of a long shot

My client has asked for the

being able to search against a customers personal characteristics. possibility of a pop up window or a seperate page asking the customer to input their personal details (where they were born, where they went to uni etc) and then click to search.

A kind of "Tailored To Me" search function? So, for example:


We want you to be able to find the products that best express who you are. Why not try our Tailored to Me search by filling in some or all of the fields below?

Which town or city were you born in? [ ]

Which county were you born in? [ ]

Which town or city did you grow up in? [ ]

Which county did you grow up in? [ ]

Where did you go to University or College? [ ]

Where do you live or work now? [ ]




etc etc

How feasible is this kind of thing?

and how well could is work with the cart

I maybe out of my depth on this one so any help any one can give would be great

Cheers

[I-CC]

Won't be straight forward that is for sure, unless simply using the advanced and custom search abilities will suffice, which i will explain within the Actinic side below, but a possible method might be as follows:

Actinic side of it:

1. You need to be using Business or above so that you can utilise the custom search abilities, i.e. having customvar properties that are then populated each time the site is updated, so for example you might have a custom property of 'cityborn' which you have products that has this property and the city within its custom property field value.

And also all of the other custom properties for citylive and you country stuff etc...

What this will then produce within the Actinic search page will be drop down selections for each of those fields of cityborn, citylive etc etc which contains the data you apply to the products themselves to associate them with each product, so if a product has a cityborn property value of Manchester for example, then Manchester would appear in the drop down list within the search page and selecting Manchester as your search option will only show products which has Manchester within its cityborn custom property values.

All of the above may not be what this is really for, but is the foundations of what will be needed.

External (NON Search Page connections):

Now, to make use of this in a click enabled fashion, you would need something along the following lines:-

http://www.yourdomain.com/yourcgibin...&ACTION=Search

but, with an appended version which would include citylivedata, countyborndata, countylivedata etc etc in the search string above and referencing its correct search term/position, which you will need to play with to get it work 100% as you require based on an and/or basis of usage etc.

The difficult part is the creation of the above link based on each persons needs without them having to keep reentering there details or using selection drop downs each and every time, which if you are creating a form to gather the information in the first place, is going to need some java script to create at best a cookie which upon clicking the submit of the form with the data in, creates the above URL and places it within a cookie that your pages can then use to populate the link, i.e.

a. Your form will need to create a full or as required URL for the calling of the search above that can be used easily and frequently within multiple pages maybe, without having to keep asking for the info, so the form is best saving this as a cookie.

b. Instead of having a full call to the URL above as your link for customers to then conduct this personalised search, the page will need to be programmed with a java script that collects the information of the cookie (i.e. the personalised URL) and show that at the point in the page.

That is a possible way of doing it, but it will take some playing around and error or function checking to make it fully usable, i.e. change the Personalised Link to Fill In This Form if the cookie does not exist yet, or Peronalised Product Search if the cookie does exist maybe and some other stuff, but those will be the basics of it all.

Some ideas I hope for you.