New catalog sequencing features in Commerce Server 2007

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A while back I had written about sequencing products and categories in the feature pack and mentioned a few features that were not supported. I am happy to say that we have now addressed all the limitations I had mentioned in this post and also added a couple of new features.

The following are the new sequencing features in Commerce Server 2007

1. Sequencing products and categories:

  • You can now sequence child products and categories in any category.
  • You can also sequence root categories and root products.
  • You can sequence variants in a product family
  • Sequencing of child products/categories, root products/categories and variants is also supported in virtual catalogs. When you add a rule from a base catalog to a virtual catalog the existing sequencing for the included items will be inherited from the base catalog. We have also provided the ability to override this inherited sequencing in the virtual catalog so that you can have these items appear in a different sequence in the virtual catalog.

2. Sequencing relationships:

      Just as you can sequence child products and categories you can also sequence product and category relationships. Sequencing of relationships is also supported in virtual catalogs where inherited sequencing of base catalog relationships can be overridden in the virtual catalog.

3. Sequencing enumeration values: We have also added the ability to sequence enumeration values of an enumerated property. This is particularly useful where the alphabetical ordering of the enumeration values does not confirm to the desired display order. For eg. it would make sense to display the values Small, Medium and Large for a Size property in that order rather than the alphabetical order. You can now use the sequencing feature to control the display order of the enumarated values. 

The above features can be implemented programmatically or they can also be done using the Business Manager UIs. In addition the sequence values are exported to and imported from catalog xml files.