Advanced searching

[Iain Fogg <ia...@westnet.com.au>]

I'm importing a large(ish) amount of product data into OFBiz, and am 
wondering about the best approach...\

My data is drawn from the book industry, so I have products that have 
additional features/attributes/content that I would like to display 
and/or search on.

Take a book's author for example. Right now, I am importing the author's 
name, storing it as a Feature, and then linking that feature to the 
books he has authored.

This works well, except that when I want to search on author, I go to 
Advanced Search and the drop-down list that is created for my Author 
feature type is populated by only a subset of the available authors. Eg, 
I have 25000 authors in the DB, but only those up to surnames starting 
with "B" are available in the drop down.

Is there a configuration option to allow me to specify a free-form text 
box for the Author search, rather than a drop-down?

Is there a better way to handle this type of data? I looked at Product 
Content, but I couldn't see whether it was possible to search on 
Content. What about using Product Attributes instead? Same problem?

Advice appreciated,

Cheers, Iain


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Re: Advanced searching

[Iain Fogg <ia...@westnet.com.au>]

David,

I have a bit of a problem with keywords. The strategy I'm adopting is to 
selectively extract the product info I need from another database, and 
directly insert this into OFBiz (writing the SQL for this is much 
simpler and orders of magnitude faster than using the entity engine). 
Once I've got the data into OFBiz, I thought I'd then be able to invoke 
the Auto Create Keywords function to generate the keywords, and hence 
leverage that powerful component of searching.

The problem is, when I invoke the keyword creation, I get a java 
out-of-memory exception (after a while). I've had a quick look through 
the code to see if there are any obvious memory leaks, but I don't know 
too much about java's memory management. Is the keyword generation meant 
to be scalable to handle arbitrarily large data sets? My current data 
set has about 25000 product records that I'm trying to keyword (I'll 
have hundreds of thousands of records when/if I'm done).

Cheers, Iain

David E Jones wrote:
>
> There are various things you can do for this sort of situation which 
> functionality already built:
>
> 1. if a feature is associated with a product the feature description 
> will be used when mining keywords, so you can enter the author name 
> (or partial) in the keyword box
>
> 2. to limit the features shown in a drop-down do a search in a 
> category and make sure the category has the proper features associated 
> with it for the products in that category; there is a tool in the 
> catalog manager to walk through products in a category and create 
> feature groups for the features of those products and associate them 
> with the category
>
> -David
>
>
> On Sep 5, 2006, at 9:08 AM, Iain Fogg wrote:
>
>> I'm importing a large(ish) amount of product data into OFBiz, and am 
>> wondering about the best approach...\
>>
>> My data is drawn from the book industry, so I have products that have 
>> additional features/attributes/content that I would like to display 
>> and/or search on.
>>
>> Take a book's author for example. Right now, I am importing the 
>> author's name, storing it as a Feature, and then linking that feature 
>> to the books he has authored.
>>
>> This works well, except that when I want to search on author, I go to 
>> Advanced Search and the drop-down list that is created for my Author 
>> feature type is populated by only a subset of the available authors. 
>> Eg, I have 25000 authors in the DB, but only those up to surnames 
>> starting with "B" are available in the drop down.
>>
>> Is there a configuration option to allow me to specify a free-form 
>> text box for the Author search, rather than a drop-down?
>>
>> Is there a better way to handle this type of data? I looked at 
>> Product Content, but I couldn't see whether it was possible to search 
>> on Content. What about using Product Attributes instead? Same problem?
>>
>> Advice appreciated,
>>
>> Cheers, Iain
>>
>>
>> --No virus found in this outgoing message.
>> Checked by AVG Free Edition.
>> Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.11.7/437 - Release Date: 
>> 4/09/2006
>>
>
>
>
> --No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG Free Edition.
> Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.11.7/437 - Release Date: 4/09/2006
>
>



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No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.11.7/438 - Release Date: 5/09/2006

Re: Advanced searching

[David E Jones <jo...@undersunconsulting.com>]

There are various things you can do for this sort of situation which  
functionality already built:

1. if a feature is associated with a product the feature description  
will be used when mining keywords, so you can enter the author name  
(or partial) in the keyword box

2. to limit the features shown in a drop-down do a search in a  
category and make sure the category has the proper features  
associated with it for the products in that category; there is a tool  
in the catalog manager to walk through products in a category and  
create feature groups for the features of those products and  
associate them with the category

-David


On Sep 5, 2006, at 9:08 AM, Iain Fogg wrote:

> I'm importing a large(ish) amount of product data into OFBiz, and  
> am wondering about the best approach...\
>
> My data is drawn from the book industry, so I have products that  
> have additional features/attributes/content that I would like to  
> display and/or search on.
>
> Take a book's author for example. Right now, I am importing the  
> author's name, storing it as a Feature, and then linking that  
> feature to the books he has authored.
>
> This works well, except that when I want to search on author, I go  
> to Advanced Search and the drop-down list that is created for my  
> Author feature type is populated by only a subset of the available  
> authors. Eg, I have 25000 authors in the DB, but only those up to  
> surnames starting with "B" are available in the drop down.
>
> Is there a configuration option to allow me to specify a free-form  
> text box for the Author search, rather than a drop-down?
>
> Is there a better way to handle this type of data? I looked at  
> Product Content, but I couldn't see whether it was possible to  
> search on Content. What about using Product Attributes instead?  
> Same problem?
>
> Advice appreciated,
>
> Cheers, Iain
>
>
> -- 
> No virus found in this outgoing message.
> Checked by AVG Free Edition.
> Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.11.7/437 - Release Date:  
> 4/09/2006
>