Search/browse by multiple categories

[lamarmiller]

Has anyone attempted to create a way for customers to search by more than a single category?

Here is my scenario: We sell NCAA licensed products such as clothing, billiard accessories, furniture, etc. Currently, we have each school set up as a top-level category and then the real categories (Billiards, Furniture, etc) are duplicated underneath each school. That ends up being a lot of categories! It also skews our category statistics.. For instance, our top 3 viewed categories could all be "Billiards". This setup basically makes that data useless.

Ideally, the search functions in CommerceBuilder, such as ProductDataSource.NarrowSearch would accept an array of Category IDs rather than a single category ID. I've looked into creating that functionality myself but am not sure how to go about doing it without having access to the CommerceBuilder Code. I toyed around with creating a wrapper around those functions that only return a subset of the list of Products based on additional criteria such as additional categories but there's a lot to it because of paging and some other things such as the CategorySearch sidebar.

Basically the way I'd like to set up my categories is to have them exist in completely separate hierarchies, rather than just one big hierarchy. The customer would choose a school and then be able to choose a product category such as Billiards. Surely other people have run into this same scenario.

[nickc]

If you are talking about a combinative set of browse filters - yes.
Implemented using "properties" associated with product template fields. Uses template/field order by, caches/regenerates product associations dynamically. Supports "hidden" filters that can be set programmatically (use host header, query string param, user group to limit product view); all maintained using standard Able admin UI. Working on context sensitive filters next...

filters.jpg