An overview of catalogs
Catalogs are hierarchies of items, organized into groups
for different purposes.
Categories
Catalogs are organized into groups of items called categories,
which enable your catalog to classify an entire item set in a number
of different hierarchical and searchable groupings.
Kit items
A kit item is an individual item comprising various components.
For example, a computer is a kit item, and items such as monitor,
keyboard, mouse, and other peripherals are its components.
Item associations
There are five types of associations that can be made between
product items.
Containers
Catalog Management provides the capability to manage containers that
can hold items.
Items with variations
An item with variations is a grouping of items that have
similar characteristics and are displayed as a single item in product
search results. This grouping is useful when limiting the individual
items that are returned during a product search.
Assets
Asset is the term used to describe an electronic media
file that you can associate with a business object.
Defining attributes
Attributes are characteristics or specifications that define
the corresponding system entities.
Item attribute management
Item attribute management enables you to create and manage
attributes for items and categories.
An overview of catalog organizations and subcatalog organizations
Typically, a catalog organization defines an item master
that is shared with the other organizations in a participant model.
The item master is defined in only one catalog, called the master
catalog, eliminating the need of other organizations to create their
own item definition.
Subcatalog organization: an example
XYZ-CORP is an enterprise and a catalog organization that
maintains items, such as processors, motherboards, and chipsets.
Seller entitlements
Enterprises define seller entitlements that grant and restrict
other organizations’ access to categories in the catalog.
Customer entitlements
Customer entitlements allow enterprises to define the items
their customers can buy. For example, an enterprise may restrict a
customer from buying items under its Computers category but allow
the customer to buy items under its TVs category.
An overview of catalog search Sterling Selling and
Fulfillment Foundation provides
the Apache Lucene open source search engine library for conducting
fast and accurate searches. The Lucene search engine enables catalog
organizations to create one searchable index file for each locale
from the data that is available in the Sterling Selling and
Fulfillment Foundation database.
Catalog index building
The Lucene searchable index file contains denormalized
item data that has been extracted from the Sterling Selling and
Fulfillment Foundation database.
The index file stores all the item data that is required for performing
fast, scalable searches.
Searching the catalog
After the index file is built, customers can search an
organization's active selling catalog by specifying search criteria.
Catalog index building: guidelines
A catalog organization must build an index of the items
in the Sterling Selling and
Fulfillment Foundation database
before customers can run a catalog search.