Subcategories Galore!
(or how to use SMART CODING with Agoracgi, Commercecgi and Web_Store.) 

Steve Kneizys
19-FEB-2000
www.agoracgi.com (formerly hosted by www.sanatoga.com)
"Home of agora.cgi (FREE shopping cart!)"

This document assumes you have a working knowledge of your shopping cart
software.  The examples here use agora.cgi, but just as easily could be
applied to commerce.cgi and web_store.cgi carts. 

For the sake of illustration, assume you have category "shirts" and
"jeans", and you have subcategories within those of "mens" and "womens". 
Suppose that within each of those categories you have "toddlers",
"children", "teens", and "adults".  We have decided that the hierarchy,
from left to right, is: 

 "clothing type" -> "gender" -> "age group"

The next thing to do is figure out how we want to code the categories.  

For "clothing type" we choose:
 "shirt" for shirts
 "jeans" for jeans

For "gender" we choose:
  "m" male
  "f" female

For "age group" we choose: 
  "n" for newborns/toddlers
  "c" for chilren"
  "t" for teens
  "a" for adults

The hard part is over!  Now for just a little bit about searches.  If
"exact_match=off" for the search, which is the default, the software just
looks for the search string as being present somewhere within the target. 
For our purposes, we would like our searches to start sometimes on the
left word boundary.  We could modify the software or use more smart
coding, well, lets do the coding!  It is suggested you begin all category
names with "c_" or "cat_" to help start searches there on the left when
required. 

For this example, we are choosing to not have a delimiter between or
subcategories, and we will run the name together.  You may want to use
dashes or underscores in between to aid in searches or readability. 

Putting it all together, here are a couple category name examples:

 c_shirtwa id for Adult Women's Shirts
 c_jeansmt is for Teenage Men's Jeans

To search for all shirts, you would use product=c_shirt in the URI or FORM
tag.  To search for all women's shirts, product=c_shirtw.  To search for
all womens clothing, well, we have a problem.  We can't do that.  Perhaps
if we use delimiters, like the "_", this will help. 

Lets add the "_":     

 c_shirt_w_a id for Adult Women's Shirts
 c_jeans_m_t is for Teenage Men's Jeans

Hmmm, I see another problem.  Perhaps there will be several different
broad categories that use "men" and "women" subcategories, so lets make it
unique here, say cw and cm for clothing for women and men, respectively: 

 c_shirt_cw_a id for Adult Women's Shirts
 c_jeans_cm_t is for Teenage Men's Jeans

That's better!  To search for all clothing for women, we use the syntax
"product=_cw_".  For all men's jeans, "product=jeans_cm".  For all
newborn/toddler clothing, use "product=_n". 

Suppose you desire to make a search form that allows people to limit the
search using SELECTION boxes.  (You can do it in many ways, including
Javascript to "build" a hidden field's value.)  Lets say you wanted to
have multiple selection boxes, each with the same name, "product".  Find
in the libray file *_db_lip.pl, there is a line: 

   @word_list = split(/\s+/,$form_value);

On agora.cgi ver 3.0e and higher, this is already done, but everyone else
should add the following just before the one shown above: 

   $form_value =~ s/\0/ /g;

That enables multiple instances of product= or keywords= in the FORM data. 
Now you can have multiple selection boxes, one for size, another for
gender, another for clothing style, then have then type in text for the
keyword search part.  Voila! 

If you think you are cluttering up your nice clean category names, well,
truth be told you may have a point.  But with agoracgi and commercecgi
there is another option, just use one of the user-define fields for this
category information instead!  In commerce.cgi, make the following change
in the commerce.setup.db file: 

@sc_db_query_criteria = (
       "query_price_low_range|2|<=|number",
       "query_price_high_range|2|>=|number",
       "p_id|0|=|string",
       "product|1|=|string",
       "user1|$db{'user1'}|=|string",
       "user2|$db{'user2'}|=|string",
       "user3|$db{'user3'}|=|string",
       "user4|$db{'user4'}|=|string",
       "user5|$db{'user5'}|=|string",
       "keywords|1,5|=|string");  

This is how it is setup in agora.setup.db file.  After you make that
change, you may search by the user fields if you so desire. 

You can put your c_shirt_cw_a style category coding inside user-defined
field 5, for example, and then do the search as user5=_shirt_ to search
for shirts.

I hope this helps somebody!