Hallo there!
First of all I would like to tell you a bit about myself so you know my skill level and so on. I’m not a dynamicweb developer and my time in the system have only been on checking some code from our other developer and tested around to get a feeling of how stuff worked in the e-commerce module. I have also watched most of the tutorial movies here on the site to get some more clues about the system so I can ask the right questions in this post. So my skills in dynamicweb are very low but other than that I’m working full time as a asp.net C# developer so I have good skills in C#, HTML, JavaScript and so on (but no in XSLT, but the movies I watched on you site learned me a lot about that topic). So this is me, so let’s jump in to my “problem” or questions or whatever to call it right now.
I’m going to build a ”build your fire truck application” and our thought about it as start was to use the of e-commerce but after looking around some it starts to fell like that’s not an option. But let me tell you how the application should work and some workarounds and see what route you think we should take. To make a fast compares with something that most of us are familiarly with, I would say that this is kind of close to build your own computer (for example this one http://www.datorbutiken.com/Navigation/Configurator.aspx?CatId=9220431&guid=df9c7c4f-bc21-4cc7-accb-fedeb77ffb60).
First of all I would like to tell you a bit about myself so you know my skill level and so on. I’m not a dynamicweb developer and my time in the system have only been on checking some code from our other developer and tested around to get a feeling of how stuff worked in the e-commerce module. I have also watched most of the tutorial movies here on the site to get some more clues about the system so I can ask the right questions in this post. So my skills in dynamicweb are very low but other than that I’m working full time as a asp.net C# developer so I have good skills in C#, HTML, JavaScript and so on (but no in XSLT, but the movies I watched on you site learned me a lot about that topic). So this is me, so let’s jump in to my “problem” or questions or whatever to call it right now.
I’m going to build a ”build your fire truck application” and our thought about it as start was to use the of e-commerce but after looking around some it starts to fell like that’s not an option. But let me tell you how the application should work and some workarounds and see what route you think we should take. To make a fast compares with something that most of us are familiarly with, I would say that this is kind of close to build your own computer (for example this one http://www.datorbutiken.com/Navigation/Configurator.aspx?CatId=9220431&guid=df9c7c4f-bc21-4cc7-accb-fedeb77ffb60).
Note before we start, I’m calling the shopping cart for shopping cart, but it doesn’t have to be your normal shopping cart, as the parts doesn’t cost money, and the user doesn’t really places an order. When the user submits it, our client should receive it and start to work on a price offer and that they send to the customer. But for simplicity, let’s call it shopping card in my description.
The app:
The app:
1. First we have the “base fire truck” that needs to be added to the shopping cart and that should just be there with some text about it.
2. Second, we have the chassis that is part of the “base fire truck” and should be added to the shopping cart to, so that the text about it is in once place when they review the order. This chassis have some options connected to it.
a. Mandatory option (the user needs to select one in each category on this page before the page can be submitted)
i. Connection
1. 60 mm
2. 50 mm
3. 40 mm
b. None mandatory options (User can add max 1 of each items, and can be just an add-on like battery box, or a dropdown with different options, like the snow chains)
i. Battery box
ii. Snow chains
1. Expensive price with high quality.
2. Mid-price with medium quality.
3. Low price with bad quality.
3. Cabin (works the same as chassis but with other options
a. Mandatory options
i. A lot of options that needs to be selected
b. None mandatory options
i. All parts don’t have this or the Mandatory options, so the system needs to handle from 0 options to unlimited.
4. And so on, there is an estimate that around 9 different main parts with unlimited mandatory and none mandatory options.
We are planning to do this entire main parts options hidden JavaScript and that they open with the user clicks a button or when trying to submit the page with some mandatory options missing.
So the problems that I did find with your system were:
1. I was only able to do subcategories as and Iframe and this will never work with the amount of JavaScript that this system will use.
2. It was possible to add the same item more the one time; a car can’t have 2 pairs of battery boxes on them on the same time.
3. It was possible to add more the one option to the basket from for example the connection, so the user can add both 60 mm and 40mm, and that’s not possible on the truck, so the system must remove the old one and add the new if the user change, not add both of them.
4. A lot of post backs to the server, which isn’t good with all the JavaScript that I want to use for this.
If it’s possible to work around this problems it would be great ofc, but I’m kind of sure that the system isn’t built for things like this?
So I have some suggestions on how it can be done different, the first one is to do a XSLT template that list all the products from the shop in one page and add customs javascript and maybe a custom shopping cart solution. For this version to work the system needs to spit out all products in the entire tree for the main product, not as the version I did test where I did only get one subgroup and had to get the next from Iframe. But as stated in the start, I’m not that good with XSLT.
Another suggestion is some type of custom module or page that builds up the page from XML data in the code behind and can then ask for subcategories in a loop on the code behind side (if its needed) and send all the data to the client so that the client only need to do once request and not many as in the test version that I have now. If it’s possible this can also use some ajax stuffs to add and remove items to the shopping cart.
So I have some suggestions on how it can be done different, the first one is to do a XSLT template that list all the products from the shop in one page and add customs javascript and maybe a custom shopping cart solution. For this version to work the system needs to spit out all products in the entire tree for the main product, not as the version I did test where I did only get one subgroup and had to get the next from Iframe. But as stated in the start, I’m not that good with XSLT.
Another suggestion is some type of custom module or page that builds up the page from XML data in the code behind and can then ask for subcategories in a loop on the code behind side (if its needed) and send all the data to the client so that the client only need to do once request and not many as in the test version that I have now. If it’s possible this can also use some ajax stuffs to add and remove items to the shopping cart.
The last suggestion is to do nearly the same as above, but instead of getting the xml that that maybe isn’t possible to get out the way I want is to just do some SQL connections on the backend, and get all the data that way.
What do you think? And have anyone done something like that with your product data before? Because we really like to use the shop data as the client knows how the site and main shop works.
/Henrik Juhlin (using the project leader Magnus account)
Alex & Fred
What do you think? And have anyone done something like that with your product data before? Because we really like to use the shop data as the client knows how the site and main shop works.
/Henrik Juhlin (using the project leader Magnus account)
Alex & Fred