Topic: Multiple Categories per Product?

I want to display all products by supplier. I can of course add supplier as a category but the products are already assigned to their respecitive category.

Is it easier / better to modify the functionality to allow multiple product / category combinations (what effect does this have on the rest of the functionality?)
or add a new Supplier field to the product DB table?

Has anyone every entcountered this before?

  • Rick
  • Member
  • Offline

Re: Multiple Categories per Product?

Hi
I think it depends really.  adding a supplier field to the product would work.  if you create a simple suppliers table and then generate a drop down select menu from that for product adding it'd be simple.

I have on one shop set it up to have three categories per product, this is because the owner wanted/needed maximum search flexibilty for their product, so I used three categories so that they  could search ( for furniture) by room of the house, by material used ( oak or pine etc) and by type of furniture - chairs, tables, wardrobes etc.

works well and isn't too hard to implement.

Rick

  • erv
  • Moderator
  • Offline

Re: Multiple Categories per Product?

i have been in similar situations, how are you going to handle shipping if these different suppliers have differing terms and rates??

Re: Multiple Categories per Product?

I have modified the code to allow multiple categories to a product.

Modifications:
Backend:
Add & Update functions modified to loop through an array of categories selected in Multiple select option in HTML. Update product_category_xref with multipled entries (if more than one category is selected)
Product List select statement updated to select DISTINCT product. Only a number of fields are required from query so I specificed the exact fields to be returned.

Front End
All overview queries (browse, featured, latest, search etc) have all been modified to select distinct product Names.

If anyone wold like the code, please let me know.

I'm not too worried about the shipping issue as this is done centrally

Re: Multiple Categories per Product?

I am attemtping to implement multiple categories, but now when a customer does a search, it shows duplicate items. ie. if a mug is in 4 categories, it shows up 4 times in the search results.
So I have tried both DISTINCT and GROUP BY in the select statement in the search query in browse.ihtml.  DISTINCT doesn't seem to do anything.   
GROUP BY seems to work, however then the footer area that shows PREV and NEXT and the page navigation dissapears!
Any ideas?