dashCommerce

Hey Guys,

I'm in the middle of writing some extensions to the dashCommerce platform.  I'm just wondering what the underlying reason was for using XSLT/XML to produce the current site + category navigation menus?

I'm building a single top-down menu that puts a few more browsing options at the users fingertips.  Mainly, I'm adding the following to a single top-bar menu:

Browse By Category | Browse By Brand (ManufacturerId) | Browse By Price Range | Other Info (this is your main navigation stuff)

So far I've done the following:

1. created the necessary sprocs

2. used subsonic to generate code for those sprocs in the Store proj (i'm assuming this is what u guys do when you make db changes)

3. Added necessary code to /Controllers/ProductController

4. Added more code to /Caching/ProductCache (for obvious reasons)

5. Modified catalog.aspx.cs to take a few new querystring params for brandid and load data based on these passed in params

I'm about to tackel the URL rewriting stuff and figured it was a good point to get some feedback (if any).

Cheers,

Matt

p.s. - I built the navigation using a ListView and the very cool jquery superfish plugin.

I can't really remember exactly what drove it, but I do know that I wanted to handle all of the "same stuff" the "same way". For example, we use sitemaps for some navigational items because they are easy to modify and they support localization. I think that is what initially drove the xml / xslt approach. Then when it came time to do the site navigation - be it pages or categories, I wanted to do it the same way so that there was consistency in the approach. Consistency in approach was a core value in developing dashCommerce 3.0. It makes changing / modifying the archtiecture that much easier down the road.

Hope this helps.

 Thanks for the speedy reply.  I think I'll stick with the same approach then and keep it consistent.

I followed the same approach and now have a functional "browse by brand" catalog browsing feature.  It didn't take too much work to get this working, just expanding on what is already in dashcommerce.

Below is a screenshot of how things look in case this is of interest to anybody else.

http://www.berlandmarketing.com/images/menucap.jpg