The Catalog System- A Brief Overview

Today, I am going write something about the catalog system in the commerce server 2007. The Catalog system not only is a very important feature of the Commerce Server 2007 but is also beneficial for large enterprise sites. Well it goes like this; the catalog system introduces the concept of putting all data in a well organized manner without actual logical interaction with the database.
This means that without interacting with the SQL server you can actually build the whole website.

A more elaboration on the topic will be that a catalog is nothing but a data entity at a large level. It is subdivided into categories and products.

CATALOG à CATEGORY à PRODUCT

This means that a catalog can be divided into several categories and each category can have various products. This is the main fundamental of the catalog system in the commerce server 2007.

Take an example of a large shopping mall site. The mall would certainly have a book store. So say we created a catalog for books.
In the Commerce Server Catalog Manager we go and make a new Catalog called Books. So the books can be said to be a catalog. The internet books, java books, novels, classics are the category of books whereas a particular book as in Unleashed .net 2.0 is a product. So here we see how the whole thing is so much sub-divided as to make things simpler. Now the question is what are the attributes and on what parameters each of these are made. So, here comes the role of the schema. For one minute just leave the example and lets study how the schema of an entity is handled in the commerce server.

XML data is considered to be favorite among some people as they say it is more structural data. Creating a xsd structure of the data is a very popular way of dealing with XML. Similarly the commerce server 2007 introduces the catalog and inventory schema manager. This manager gives the power to populate various structures or schema for various definitions of the catalog System. It is mainly divided into three parts. Let’s start from the smallest entity definition to a bigger one.

Property Definitions: The property definition gives the power to define properties. These are the Attributes of a Product in the catalog System. The Property is the smallest entity that is there is the catalog system. The property is a attribute of a product. For example for a particular book we have title and author, all these are the properties of a product.
Product Definitions: The Product Definitions is what the schema for a particular product is. This means that when we start to make a product then the catalog system asks for a product definition. This is basically the attributes of a product.

Note: Please don’t ge6t confused between the two definitions. The property definition is the general definition for all the attributes in the entire catalog system whereas the product definition is restricted to the schema for a product. It means that the product definition is mainly for a specific product whereas a property is a different universal thing. Moreover on creating a product definition we get a a property list to choose properties to make a schema for a product definition.

Category Definition: A category definition also involves choosing from a list of properties; On the contrary here we are selecting properties for the attributes of a specific category.

This was an abstract of what the Catalog System is in the Commerce Server 2007.
The Commerce Server introduces many such systems which are very beneficial for making good ERP sites. My next post will give you an idea of the coding involved in Catalog System.