Developer forum

Any ideas on this? I have a pretty pressing need to figure out the URL generation. Where should I go to get started? We have some products-1, products-2 type situations and need to figure out how to prioritize them and ensure that they are set correctly and consistently. The content pages are ok, but it's the ecom group URLs that I would like more insight into.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Scott.

No ideas. Generally using pages for ecommerce structures is usually a bad idea - instead I would recommend using custom group fields to add 'rich' information for group pages. Alternatively use regular pages as you already did and then only list products on those pages and not use product lists and group navigation at all. Mixing is very difficult to control.

There are basically 2 url indexes in Dynamicweb - one for pages and one for ecommerce groups/products/variants.

To solve the abc.com/products and abc.com/products-1 issue - use settings in Customized URLs section in Settings to create a seperate url index per website. That requires 2 domains/hosts in order to work. If you have only one domain, you have to use 2 different names - otherwise the system cannot tell the difference. See https://doc.dynamicweb.com/documentation-9/platform/platform-tools/customized-urls#3512 You can use the URL field on a page to override the name used in url. See https://doc.dynamicweb.com/documentation-9/content/content/pages#3239

For group structures, there is not much you can do. There is one index for all catalogs and languages, so if you have 2 or more groups in the root of any shops with the same name, they will be named xxx-1 etc. Names HAVE to be unique in the root - and paths also have to be unique if using full path in URL. URLs are not recorded to database.

You can use showurls=true and showurlindex=true to see ecommerce urls and page urls in the frontend. They only show the first 1000 or so URLs though.

BR Nicolai

Thanks Nicolai. This is really helpful, especially the querystring parameters. I did some looking and here's what I found:

• We do need to use content pages for the ecom landing pages because they are made up of many rich paragraphs with a nice responsive design and such. But, I've found that that wasn't the issue. 
• The issue with the products-1 and products-2 turned out to be because we have duplicate group names in the tree structure. They do have a different full path though. For example:
  • abc.com/products/something/widgets
  • abc.com/products/otherthing/widgets-1
    • This 2nd one lost the URL generation fight and got the -1. However, they are in different paths so they don't need to have unique names for the last part. Is there a way to change that for ecom groups?

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Scott

Ok, great. That should work. Just tested that using Rapido - looks like the attached. You have the same setup?

A couple of things to look for:

Given your example

• abc.com/products/something/widgets

Products = Page
Something = Group (If this is a page, this could be the problem)
widgets = Group

Also if you look at my dump #4 below, that is the setting you want.

The last thing that can be wrong is that you have 2 languages with the same names in the structure - that would also give you duplicate url structures.

BR Nicolai

I just realized that it's only the 3rd level group that is doing this. The other groups are fine. I do have the settings that you have, and there is only one language on this site. Your example sounds like the same situation as my setup.

I guess I can post the URLs here in the forum. They won't always work since it's a dev site URL.

Here are two folders with the same name, but one of them gets the -1. Note that 'docks' doesn't do it though.

• https://qa-walleye.dw-demo2.com/parts-components/docks/roll-a-dock-1 
• https://qa-walleye.dw-demo2.com/products/docks/roll-a-dock

The group page is working well, but, if you're curious, here it is (images will be added soon):

• https://qa-walleye.dw-demo2.com/products/docks

Scott

Hi Scott

Tuff one! Seems like you have the same group twice in the database with a parent with same name:

SELECT * FROM ecomgroups where groupid='L3-2.1.10' or groupid='L3-1.1.10'

I did not look into relation tables - but the data is not shown in the catalog tree, so maybe they are not attached to the shop??

Could this be the cause?

BR Nicolai

Hi Nicolai,

That's really helpful, and that appears to be it. And that helped me fully figure out what's happening.

It's not necessarily that the group assignment is duplicated to another group, but that the groups are in two shops. So I could use your guidance on that then.

First, here's the issue. 

Hi Nicolai,

Just a heads up that while working on another part of this, I bumped into another issue with the #1 option above. So I've started to move to the #2 method. We'll create a copy of the whole ecomgroup tree rather than assigning the one tree to two shops.

If you have a better best practice recommendation, I'll be curious to hear, but otherwise, it's set in motion now to change this. I believe it will address a few issues.

Scott

Hi Scott

Ah - thank you for explaining. I just found the duplicate paths in the URL index.

See attachment for the reason of the duplicate paths. The Docks group has been marked to leave out its parent in URL generation causing it have the same path...

BR Nicolai

Hi Nicolai,

Interesting. I think you're right, but I'm surprised about that. 

The paths are still unique:

• /parts-components/docks/roll-a-dock-1 
• /products/docks/roll-a-dock

They are subfolders of docks, so they still have a unique FQDN.

We are ignoring the parent group URL. That's so that we don't get a /products/products in the URL. But, shouldn't that be ok?

I did a full cleanup of the data in the dev site (different URL: https://dev-walleye.dw-demo.com/parts-components/docks/marinas-3) and now the Ecom and PIM groups are completely separated. But it didn't resolve the issue. So I bet that you're right that it's because of that setting. In fact, I tested and confirmed that you're right. But, if I turn off that setting, the URLs look like this:

https://dev-walleye.dw-demo.com/parts-components/parts-and-components/docks/marinas

That's an age old battle that we've had. Is there a better way to have a good organized structure in Ecom without the duplicate shop + group in the URL?

Feel free to test on the dev site, and thanks for your help with this.

Scott

Hi Scott

Thanks for the explanation. And yes I fully understand. We are currently working on a replacement for Ecommerce URLs provider that can use multiple url indexes based on website (and hence domain) to tell the multiple, but similar, group paths apart.

My only solution right here and now is to ensure uniqueness using the "URL" field on the group properties - and add something unique on the root groups in your PIM catalog as that would generate URLs for the PIM catalog that are unique and leave the main catalog URLs to win the battle of the prettiest URL.

BR Nicolai

Hi Nicolai,

Thanks. Now I understand the details on this so I can focus on the right part. I'll see what we can do with the group properties and making sure that everything is unique enough to keep it happy.

Thanks again.

Scott