Accessing pages direct from index.html

[harry]

i want to get to a set of pages in acatalog direct from index.html (and i want to keep index and acatolog/index separate)

i noticed that when i put in index.html a link like

actalog/services.html, Actinic generates it as /PreviewHTML/acatalog/services.html, so that when you go to Preview, it looks for the wrong link

i f conversely, you strip out the 'acatalog/' then it previews ok, but is unlikely to work when i get to upload the site

any ideas short of doing a customvar for each link and setting it according to preview or site upload modes?

[davidfarndon]

hi,

surprisingly I might be able to point you at a solution to this .. I want to do exactly the same thing with a jump menu on the index page of my site which takes you directly to a particular product (I think you can take someone to a specific section as well if you don't want to pinpoint a specific product)

I was wandering through the advanced guide and there are some clues in there .. I'm absolutely no expert in this, and have yet to implement it on my site .. but I reckon this is the bit ..

Taking People Straight to a Product
It is possible to take people straight to a specific product with a hyperlink of the following form:

chapter 4, page 41 ...

http://your.URL/cgi-bin/ss00000x.pl?PRODREF=12345&NOLOGIN=1
Where:
• http://your.URL/cgi-bin is the URL of your CGI-BIN
• ss00000x.pl is the name of your search script with the 'x' replaced with your CGI ID number
• 12345 is the product reference of your desired product.
• &NOLOGIN=1 is an essential thing to add to the end of the URL to order to bypass the login page
You can use this functionality to create a small form in the page where people can search for their desired product by entering the reference number into a text field. The HTML for this would have the following form:
<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://www.myserver.com/ss00000x.pl">
<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="NOLOGIN" VALUE="1">
<P>Product Reference:
<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="PRODREF" SIZE="20">
<INPUT TYPE="submit" VALUE="Lookup">
</P>
</FORM>
Note: If you are putting this form within the main page details (e.g. within Act_ProductBody.html or Act_CatalogBody.html), you would need to enter </FORM> above the code and:
<FORM METHOD=NETQUOTEVAR:CGIMETHOD ACTION="NETQUOTEVAR:CGIURL">
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="SHOP" VALUE="NETQUOTEVAR:SHOP">
after it in order to not disrupt the main form that controls adding products to the shopping cart.

Linking from Other URLs

Note: If you are using this code from outside the 'acatalog' folder then you will need to include a hidden form field of 'ACTINIC_REFERRER=' where the value is your 'Catalog URL' from 'Advanced | Network Setup'. For example:
http://your.URL/cgi-bin/ss00000x.pl?....URL/acatalog/
and also
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="ACTINIC_REFERRER" VALUE="http://your.URL/acatalog/">

looks quite promising I thought
have fun .. David

[Mike Hughes]

It is a problem with Actinic in that it places all the preview code into /PreviewHTML/ and so any reference to files in /acatalog/ can't be found.

The other problem you will find is that Actinic will typically throw up errors when you try and do a snapshot as it doesn't realise that the files you're linking to are ones that it creates itself (and hence doesn't backup in the snapshot). Because it can't find the files it then complains that the files can't be found and throws up an error message. These can safely be ignored though.

Personally, I prefer the direct links and avoid the /cgi-bin/ss.... ones as they are nowhere near as search engine friendly as straight html links. If you have customers accounts though the customer will lose his logon status if he follows one of the direct links.

Mike