B2C ISA / E-Commerce: Displaying products from subcategories

Question

Hi there, perhaps someone can answer my question: Is there any hack to display products from subcategories when the user navigates to a parent category?
Currently a parent category, which has no products itself but only subcategories shows "No products found" when the user clicks on it:
- parent
- - child1
- - child2
- - child3
=> Click on parent: "No products found"
=> Click on child: Displays products from child category
But it should be like that
=> Click on parent: Displays products from all child categories (for example, the newest or randomly the first 20)
=> Click on child: Displays products from child category
Edited by: Thomas Diegelmann on Jan 7, 2009 1:06 PM

Answer 1

Hello Thomas,
For the purpose of (or in the name of) optimized search (from TREX), the Catalog search and display features work only one category or subcategory at a time. This value of current category is used in many places to kind of filter / restrict the query / display.
One of the Catalog classes - GetCategoriesTreeAction recursively goes through the catalog and knows the fact that some are parent and some are child. It keeps the sign notation
+ = Has children but not expanded, will not show
- = Has children and shown now
<no sign> = No children.
Hacking through the code was lot tougher because, you have to deal with other niceities such as
There is no difference between a sub (child) category or a product in a sub category. They are all children in the tree.
Class uses recursion to traverse through the tree and maintain this. Without a very well defined tree structure - such as "We have a main category, one sub category and below this we have another sub-category which has products - if you can define your catalog something like this, then you can break the recursion and and use iteration.
Display of product list in item-pages, like 5 items/page with pagination.
Sort capability
These are all tied very tightly to the current selected categorie in path.
The only easy way will be to rework on your catalog design / structure itself.
In one of our cases we had the following liberty -
the catalog structure was clearly defined for all categories, so, we got rid of recursion,
the catalog was relatively small
We did not use the item page
So, we were able to use the following classes and were able to display the we wanted. We just didn't use the categorieinpath.do
WebCatInfo
WebCatItemList
WebCatItem
WebCatItemComparator - for sorting
Easwar Ram
http://www.parxlns.com