Tutorial: Creating views for multiple catalogs in a store

 

Introduction

In this tutorial you will learn how to create multiple catalogs for a store. Then you will learn how to create views for those catalogs. Finally you will create links from the store homepage to each of the views you create. There can be many reasons to have multiple catalogs. For example, you might have a requirement for one holiday sales catalog and one spring sales catalog. Instead of creating two different stores with two separate master catalogs, you can create two sales catalogs from one master catalog, and then modify the store to display a particular sales catalog when the customer uses the URL you set up for that purpose. You can also provide a link back to the master catalog so the customer can see all the items in the catalog.

After completing this tutorial you should be able to create multiple catalogs, create references to views for those catalogs, and link a store header to the view references you create.

Audience

This tutorial is intended for store developers using the IBM WebSphere Commerce product.

Time required

Expect this tutorial to take 2 hours to complete.

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial you should be familiar with the following terms and concepts:

• Sales Catalogs
• WebSphere Commerce Accelerator

Additional concepts:

• Catalogs can be referenced using unique identifiers instead of database keys
  • Category Display URL
• Sales catalog categories can be resequenced
  • Changing the category display sequence
• Sales catalog categories can link to multiple category parents. In this case, category information that is changed in the master catalog is automatically updated in all sales catalog multiple references.
  • Linking a category
• Sales catalog products can be resequenced
  • Changing catalog entry display sequence
• Sales catalog products can be assigned to multiple category parents. In this case, product information that is changed in the master catalog is automatically updated in all sales catalog multiple references.
  • Assign catalog entries to a category
• A subset of catalog data can be duplicated. This could minimize the amount of maintenance required to create new data.
  • Duplicating the category structure and catalog entries

 

Tutorial tasks

This tutorial is divided into the following steps:

1. Create sales catalogs
2. Create URL references
3. Add hypertext links

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