Searching on Custom Properties

[DVDBritain]

Hi,

Currently i am working on an update to my website, and i'm in a dilema. Currently i list products by both letter - a-z and by category.

Unfortunately at the moment i must have two products representing the same thing in both groups (with a slightly different name).

This causes me a few problems in that 1, if a change is made to 1 product i have to change the other. It halfs the amount of different products that i can have. Its a pain ;)

So is it possible to set up a Custom property for say for each product (in this case the category) and then do a search on all products that would meet that critera.

So i guess my question after all that typing is can i do a search on a custom property and how!

Thanks

Jason

[NormanRouxel]

You need Actinic Business to allow searching on Custom Properties.

However if you only have Catalog here is a trick that simulates the searchable custom property. In your product description put:-

!!<<noscript>>!!Hidden Keywords Etc!!<</noscript>>!!

These words won't show up on the product page (except in the very rare case that the user has a non-JavaScript browser) but will be included in the search index.

Norman

[DVDBritain]

After testing it does work great.

The only recommendation for anyone would be that the words you use as the hidden key word as shown below

<<noscript>>!!Hidden Keywords Etc!!<</noscript>>

Not be a word that can be searched by normally. For example i started off with the word horror. Though i had only added this onto 1 item it found about 90. Because some had the word horror in their text description (though they were not horror films).

So use a code that is not a real word. For example if you add a hidden word for all action films, use CODEACTION. That way it wont pick up everything else.

Thanks for the help. Shame its more work for me ...lol

Jason

[cdicken]

Just for the record, to search on Custom Properties in Actinic Business, you do the following:

1) Create a new custom property in 'Advanced | Custom Properties'.

2) Assign values for the custom property in the 'Properties' tab of a product. Ensure that 'Searchable' is ticked.

3) In 'View | Search Settings | Searchable Properties', add a new row and select your search property from the drop-down. Fill in the rest of the fields as appropriate.

The search fields will appear on the search page online