Search Indexing of Product Fields

[FredW]

Hi ShopSite friends,

We are using custom Product fields and a custom template to invoke a program during page generation that generates html code for product cross reference numbers in the more information pages.

My testing of a prototype program shows the html is successfully generated, but it appears that the search indexing does not pick up the content (i.e. product cross reference numbers) that the program generates. Does the search index work from the content in the product fields in the data base and not the resulting html code?

Is there any way we can get the search indexing to examine the html contents from the output of the program we call?

I an provide pointers to my example if that helps.

Thanks in advance,
FredW

[Jim]

Yes the indexing is done from the data in the product record and not from the html code on a page.

You can select which field are included when being indexed by going to Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing. Any content that is not in one of the product fields which you check on that page will not be indexed.

There are third party indexing options which index the entire html page but I am not familiar with them so can't give a recommendation.

[FredW]

Yes the indexing is done from the data in the product record and not from the html code on a page.

You can select which field are included when being indexed by going to Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing. Any content that is not in one of the product fields which you check on that page will not be indexed.

There are third party indexing options which index the entire html page but I am not familiar with them so can't give a recommendation.

Thanks Jim,

I was afraid you were going to say that. I don't like that answer, but will have to accept it. We will look at alternative solutions.

Fred

[Jim]

Can you explain in more detail how your application is generating the information you want to have searched.

If it is using custom fields you might be able to put the information in another custom field before hand, (maybe run your script in a spread sheet and upload the data to a custom field you search). There is also a "Search Keywords:" field for each product that can be used to put other information that may not be in any of the other fields. This is often used to put frequently misspelled words that you want to be found but don't want to actually put in a text field that people will see but it could contain anything you think shoppers will search for.

[FredW]

Jim,

The content our custom program was going to generating is a table of old part numbers the part we are selling replaces. See sample here:http://keithdemo.keithspecialty.com/k/fw-st9120u1011.htm - this sample has an html table with the content in it statically created in more information product information field. But we want to dynamically create it at generation time using a custom program.

Since these old part numbers are used in more than one page in our website, we wanted to maintain it in an SQL database and use it to be the source for the html code used for the pages that need it. Here is another page where the same content shows up: http://keithdemo.keithspecialty.com/hvac.xref.oem.Honeywell.htm. This page is one over 147 pages in our classic site containing the cross reference content. We also have over 5500 product pages that contain content like this. To manually copy and past that data into a product shopsite field is not feasible. I can build a excel file to import the data to a product field, but there are two problems with that: One is that the import content would have to have html wraped around it for ease of display and two we can't maintain it easy in one place.

We can get the conent into a SQL database easily which is the best place to maintain it. Invoking a program to read it from the SQL database and generate html code sounded like a great idea (actually Lauren suggested this), but my testing shows that content is not indexed by shopsite.

I'm open to alternative ideas.

Fred