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Member

m.rutter - 11/9/2010 8:43:43 AM

HOWTO: managing large number of products

Hi everybody,
I'm working on a e-commerce site where I have a large number of products grouped into a few categories.

Looking at the official documentation and the e-commerce starter site, I found that both categories and products
are organized in documents and products documents are also products inside the e-commerce module. It's ok for
the categories (and that's exactly what I need) but it's very hard to do (and to manage) for the products.

What I need is a solution to manage products only from the e-commerce module, without creating a CMS document
for every product, and then show the products in the site.

Some time ago I remember I read a document on how to manage a large number of products without having documents into
the CMS content tree, but I cannot find that document any more.

Please, does exists a solution for this scenario?

Thank you very much.
MR

Kentico Support

kentico_zdenekc - 11/15/2010 7:18:24 AM

RE:HOWTO: managing large number of products

Hello,

As you can see in http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/ecommerceguide/products.htm, default scenario depends on product documents.

Anyway, you can display products directly from the DB (COM_SKU table) using QueryRepeater (Repeater with custom query - http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/controls/queryrepeater.htm).
or using custom DataSource webparts:
http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/developing_datasource_web_parts.htm

As for the document about managing large number of products, you can find useful
KB article about importing products - Products-import-from-external-source, this approach however creates product documents as well.

Please let us know if you need any additional details.

Regards,
Zdenek


Member	m.rutter - 11/15/2010 7:35:07 AM RE:HOWTO: managing large number of products Thank you Zdenek. I will look to the documents that you referred. Regards, MR

Member

m.rutter - 11/18/2010 4:58:21 AM

RE:HOWTO: managing large number of products

kentico_zdenekc wrote:
As for the document about managing large number of products, you can find useful
KB article about importing products - Products-import-from-external-source, this approach however creates product documents as well.

Hello Zdenek, please can you confirm me that the document you mentioned applies to Kentico 5.5 as well (I already read it in the past but I thought that it was not applicable to Kentico 5.5)?

Moreover, the problem, in my case, isn't to have or not documents in the content tree, the problem is the number of documents I have. In a single category (Menu page item) I can have up to 10.000 (and even more) products which means 10.000 childs nodes ... I would like to avoid having such a number of leafs in the content tree. Is this a bad idea (for your point of view)?

Thank you for your support.
MR

Kentico Support

kentico_zdenekc - 11/25/2010 5:49:24 PM

RE:HOWTO: managing large number of products

Hello,

I'm sorry for the late reply.

Yes, the code can be used in 5.x versions as well, since the core API hasn't changed. Or have you experienced any problems?

The high number of documents might be a problem if not handled carefully (loading large sets of documents in custom code or webparts and similar), it depends also on how are they stored in terms of structure...

You can set the number of displayed "child nodes" in content tree in Site Manager -> Settings -> Content Management -> Max tree nodes.

Quoting the performance report for 5.5 version made in July:

"The website performance depends also on the number of pages and other items in the CMS database. Kentico CMS was optimized for high number of items and it was tested with 100,000 documents and 10,000,000 users stored in the database. Not only the public website, but also Kentico CMS administration interface can handle this number of items without a negative effect on usability and user interface responsiveness."

As I mentioned, you can still consider creating a custom DataSource Webpart and use it to load the products from the database directly, avoiding large sets of documents in the content. It is however good to mention to use some caching options and measures, otherwise the result could be rather slow than with documents stored in content tree.

Regards,
Zdenek C