User-defined page redirects for missing Product/Category IDs

[AbleMods]

I have written my own customization to handle this well, however I feel it should be included in a future AC7 release.

When a product or category is deleted, AC7 will drop back to the home page if any external links try to jump to them. While this is acceptable behavior, the arriving site visitor has no clue what just happened or why - they were expecting a product or category page to be displayed.

My solution was to create two new store-wide settings - MissingProductURL and MissingCategoryURL. I added these to the Configure->Store page.

In the appropriate user controls on the visitor side, I test for invalid product/category ID references and response.redirect to the admin-configured URLs. This gives the site admin the opportunity to tell the visitor why they didn't arrive where they expected and allows the opportunity to offer other marketing/search features available.