Catalogue administration

The Mercatum catalogue is separated into a set of distinct hierarchies. There can be any number of these. A user browsing/searching on a hosted site will be viewing one of these hierarchies, their initial one is determined by the site's configuration although it can be changed later if required through appropriate page design. Hierarchies can be shared between sites, in order to assist in the rapid rollout of new sites that have differing user interfaces but share product data.

When you first load the catalogue tab, you should be presented with a tree representing the system's default hierarchy. If no hierarchy exists, and you have permission to modify hierarchies, you will just see a form to create one. This form will always be present, allowing you to add more if necessary.

A hierarchy consists of a number of folders, under a single root folder. A folder can either contain other folders or it can contain products, but it cannot contain a combination of the two. Folders and products differ in the following ways:

  1. Folders can only exist in a single hierarchy, but products can be placed in as many hierarchies as required. Note that products cannot be placed at more than one position within a particular hierarchy.
  2. Products must have at least one identifier attribute populated with a value.
  3. Folders may associated account/site-specific visibility settings, whereas products have only a global flag that indicates whether they can be ordered or not. N.B. there are other criteria that indicate whether a product is orderable, such as pricing/stock availability, however they are not controlled through this interface. If pricing/stock is controlled through back-office-driven data, then manually changing this flag is not recommended, as it will be automatically changed by feeds of data from the back-office.

To modify a hierarchy in some way, right-click the folder you wish to change and select the appropriate action from the menu that appears. In some cases, you may see menu entries that are disabled. For example, if a folder already contains sub-folders, then it will not be possible to add a product directly into it. Also, only folders can be renamed. You can also make changes to the catalogue using drag and drop techniques.

Figure 1 shows an example hierarchy, populated with a number of sub-folders. The following controls are available:

a) drop-down list of all hierarchies available on the system
b) hierarchy visibility settings
c) your preferred product code scheme
d) options to delete or rename entire hierarchies
e) structure of displayed hierarchy
Fig. 1 - Hierarchy options
  1. This list allows you to change the hierarchy currently being displayed. Depending on the modules installed, the list may be split into sections. These will be detailed later on, although as a general rule hierarchies that are used by a site are listed first, followed by all the rest.
  2. Depending on who they are or what site they are using on the system, a user will see a particular set of folders/products. It is possible to prevent individual folders showing up on a certain site, or to provide special offers to a high-value customer. These settings allow you to check at a glance whether something is visible under a set of conditions. When specified, these controls also augment the tree's context menu, so you can quickly change visibility settings for a single account/site across a large section of the catalogue.
  3. A product can have multiple codes that can be used to identify it to the system. At present, a single installation of Mercatum can use only one of these codes at once, although at some point it should become possible to use multiple different code schemes concurrently on a running system. The selected code scheme here simply affects the product information displayed to you, it does not change the code scheme used by the underlying Mercatum software.
  4. To rename or delete an entire hierarchy, select this header and update the preferences within. Note that deleting a hierarchy is a slow process, and may not immediately return control to your browser. You will be asked to confirm before you delete a hierarchy, for this reason.
  5. The tree representing the hierarchy's structure. Folders will be greyed out if they are invisible using the current hierarchy settings.