AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Thought I'd share this weekends progress. Thanks to Judy for the idea to add a Reviews tab. It works nicely and even shows the number of reviews in the tab text. Ajax postbacks are handled gracefully so submitting a review does not cause the selected tab to change or the description to re-display. That took quite a bit of time to perfect but it works nicely now.

Here are some example products the demonstrate the various new tricks I've added. Notice on the airgun rifle how choosing different variants now updates the description AND resets the selected tab. My last version did not reset the selected tab when a variant was chosen, so it was a little confusing.

http://www.solunar.com/Pump-Airgun-P23307.aspx

This product demonstrates how a large variant-based product updates both the product image and the product description when different variants are selected:

http://www.solunar.com/Accu-Choke-Tube-P25046C514.aspx

The "optional" tabs are now displayed only if they have content. So "Accessories" won't even render if there are no upsell products associated with the displayed product. Same goes for the More Details tab.

http://www.solunar.com/iGolf-neo-Pocket ... 20242.aspx
http://www.solunar.com/Minn-Kota-55-Pow ... P2294.aspx

Also note how the Reviews and Accessories tabs both have a quantity indicator in the tab to show how many entries are included in that tab. Saw that the other day on a site and liked the idea so I incorporated it into my display.

This item shows all the tabs in action:
http://www.solunar.com/Humminbird-580-D ... P2512.aspx

I've put alot of work into this one user control, but I think it has turned out very nice.

I did judys setup to add reviews to what you had done before..works very nice. Mind sharing the code to make it list how many reviews there are on the tab?

My code is very different from Judy's now, so I can't help you with her version. I'm sure she'd be happy to add it, it's quite simple.

OK, quite simple took me 45 minutes but I came up with it. (Count as learning experience not billable time. )

In ProductDesscriptionTabbed.ascx.cs I added:
int _ReviewsCount = ProductReviewDataSource.CountForProduct(_ProductId);

right before
//Setup the tabstrip


Then I changed this line:
TabStrip2.Tabs[0].Text = this.Tab1Caption + " (" + _ReviewsCount + ")";

test for a 0 count so the tab doesn't show (0) if you want it like mine

Worked great..thanks Judy

Any idea why I am getting this error today and my tabs dont display?

That looks like an ASP.Net cache file. Restart your IIS service or have your application pool cycled. I would guess the ASP.Net cache has something wrong in it.

An alternative would be to make a small change to your web.config file and then change it back again right away. IIS will see the change and force a complete recompile of your site - a lot of times that fixes a cache issue too.

You didn't change anything in your ~/Bin folder did you?

Joe, the tab interface is looking very slick!

I've been neck deep in a SAP implementation at my company and have had little time to work on designing my new site, but I know some of the groundwork you have laid out in this area will be very helpful and it is appreciated big time!

I hope the Able staff and namely, Logan are keeping up with this tabbed interface. I think if they concentrated some effort on adding custom controls into the admin UI for AC7 they would really do a lot to refine their already great cart. I'll refer to my post in this thread for my thoughts on how I'd like to see the tab system work. (and from some info I got with Joe in his reply there and by IM, this shouldn't be too hard to customize into my system once full source is purchased, but it seems like a legit feature request for the general AC7 product)

(and a shameless plug here for anotherpost... The only other area I have found the cart lacking in my early design stages is the product photo gallery, hopefully some of the thoughts on this post will be considered by the powers that be as well...)

Thanks Joe! Looking forward to implementing some of your ideas into my upcoming design!

A restart fixed it..not sure what caused it.

Happens with IIS from time-to-time. When IIS handles a .Net application, the programming code goes through an intermediate compile and then the entire application gets compiled again for memory efficiency and caching purposes. This (vastly) improves server performance and server-side page execution.

On certain occasions, usually when page code is updated, IIS will perform the intermediate compile but fail to notice it needs to do the final application compile again. So the next time the page is hit, the fail-safe sees a difference between the cached compile versus the intermediate compile and throws the error.

This isn't the case every time you see that error, but it covers it most of the time.

That's REALLY cool!!! It "otta" be just standard with the Able package! Now that would be a fantastic value.