Combining Tables

[carlbsmith]

Ok, I've read a couple of posts on this, but haven't seen anything that fits exactly what I am doing.

I've got a table with different camera manufacturers (Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, etc). In all of the different table fields I have technical attributes that people can search by to narrow down to a specific part. Easy, that all works.

What I want to do is take one vendor, (let's just say Samsung for example), and create a separate searchable page that only shows Samsung product. My initial though was maybe I could just create a new web component for Samsung, and link it to the table that shows all of the manufacturers, but the issue with that seems to be that I don't want all of the different attributes to shows up in the search for other products, I only want Samsung attributes to show up (if that makes sense). Maybe there is some way to restrict searchable attributes to only a specific manufacturer. What I don't want to do is set all my search options to static, that would be too time consuming.

So then I decided that maybe I could create some sort of secondary table that feeds from the main table, but only populates Samsung parts. This is where I seem to be stuck. I've looked at mapped tables, and sets, and can't seem to find the right solution. Let me say this too, another viable solution would be if I had say a Panasonic table, a Samsung table, etc, and combined all of those into a master table. I don't care which way the data flows (master to individual, or individual to master), I just want the data in the tables to be shared somehow. Make sense at all? Any suggestions?

[lgrupido]

Re: Combining Tables

What type of database are you working with? Are you using native Alpha Tables, or are you using SQL tables (like MYSQL or MSSQL.)

For either case, One way to do this would be:

Have a page where you select your manufacturer.

Once selected, you can store that manufacturer ID into memory - a session variable. Alternatively, you can send it to the next page as a page variable.

Then, you can use that variable to filter the product page - so you only show products for that manufacturer.

Does that help get you started?

[madtowng]

Re: Combining Tables

It almost sounds like you want to do a controlled search (much like HP, Dell, and Sharp), where you get the broadest piece of information first,
and then limit the next part of the search to the data you have already collected.

This is very doable within Alpha.