cpsabari

All,

Does Commerce Server 2002 have any feature which will support
implementing a thesaurus functionality ?

The requirement is like this : If the user searches for, say, 'RED',
he should be shown items which are RED as well PINK, ORANGE, BROWN etc
assuming these three colors can be defined as synonyms for RED. This
is just a vague example.

I've read that defining a product property called Keywords and
populating it with all the related keywords for that particular
product and then doing a search on that field will do the job. Is that
the only way to implement this thesaurus functionality ?

Thanks
Sabari.

tom dacon

On a CS2000 site I did a couple of years ago, we created a synonym table for
the product colors and maintained it through BizDesk. Each product color was
present as a site term, and for each of the color names we supported up to
two synonyms. When we built the search terms fora requested color we looked
up and added the synonyms to the WHERE clause. This was a clothing store, so
they had colors like rose and umber, and we wanted them to get those product
hits if they searched for, in these examples, red or brown. It worked pretty
well as long as the client remembered to add synonyms when they added new
product colors.

Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting

cpsabari

Thanks Tom. I'm not at all familiar with CS2000. When you say 'site
term', what do u mean ? product property ? and how do u add synonyms
to it ? and how did u modify ur search clause ? did u use raw sql
statements (like select * from xyz where contains (*,blahblah)) or did
u use the commerce server search APIs ?

Thanks
Sabari.

tom dacon

Hi, sorry about assuming that you were already familiar with Commerce
Server. A Site Term is a list of property values that is supported by CS's
Business Desk user interface. The administrator can add or delete particular
property values in the list, and those are the only values that are
available for assignment as a property value for a particular product
property when the property values are being set through the Business Desk
user interface. The lists of valid property values are supported through the
admin interface, and through a different admin interface you can add new
lists and link them to product properties. There are underlying SQL Server
tables supporting this, and they're created and updated through the admin
interfaces (Commerce Server Manager, which is a management console snap-in,
and the Business Desk interface, which is designed to be used both by the
site developer and the client's site administrator). All this is do***ented
in the Commerce Server help files.

While you can build your own SQL SELECT statements, the Commerce Server
API's also support searching via their own methods, so you can do your
searching by either technique. The Commerce Server API approach is probably
better for performance, since CS's data provider does caching of result
sets, if I remember correctly.

Getting into Commerce Server is going to take some study of the sample sites
and the do***entation. At first it's pretty overwhelming but after you dig
into it it starts to make some sense.

Good luck with it,
Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting

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cpsabari

Tom,
I was telling that I was not familiar with CS2000. I'm pretty familiar
with CS2002 - not knowing certain terms like 'site term' can be
attributed to my ignorance

I tried the method of maintaining a synonym table and then pulling the
synonyms from that table whenever there is a keyword search. I
construct the freetext search keyword based on the results I pull out
from synonym table. I tried to use a combination of "OR" and "AND" on
my keyword search and it looks like its considering everything as
"OR". FYI, I'm working on the Retail2002 site.

Sample relevant code :

SearchKeywords = "( pink OR maroon OR brown OR red ) AND shirt"
catalogSearch.FreeTextSearchPhrase = SearchKeywords
data = catalogSearch.Search(totalProducts)

The resulting recordset indicates that it is fetching all products
with either one of these keywords present but if I try

SearchKeywords = "red AND shirt"

it works fine.

Any idea whats wrong ? Is there anything wrong in the syntax ?
Thanks
Sabari.

cpsabari

bumping up this thread, hoping that someone can answer my question.

thanks
sabari.

tom dacon

Sabari, sorry I didn't get back to you earlier. I don't access to a running
copy of CS2K these days, nor to the code that I developed this feature in,
so I'm afraid that I won't be able to give you any further help on this. I
last worked on the site about a year and a half ago and my memory's starting
to fade. What I do remember is that the CS2K OLEDB provider is kind of
brain-damaged, so if your query is going through that provider some of the
flexibility that you'd expect in your SQL statements is missing. Look around
in the docs about the limitations of the CS2K provider and see if that has
something to do with what you're seeing.

Good luck,
Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting

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'RED',

BROWN etc

This

Is that