Configure Konakart for a bookstore

[bryant]

Hi All,

I am looking into using Konakart to host an online bookstore, but there are some queries before I can begin.

1) How can konakart be customized to store author name. since Author to Book is a one-to-many relationship, ideally we should have a seperate Author table, and the author dropdown should be available while adding/editing a product.

2) How can ISBN be stored...I am guessing in one of the five custom fields available for Product

3) How can author and ISBN be included in product search? Is there any information available on how search is implemented in Konakart...1) is it simple sql search 2) is it full-text search 3) or is it Lucene based

Any information on the above will be of great help,
Thank you.

[trevor]

1) How can konakart be customized to store author name. since Author to Book is a one-to-many relationship, ideally we should have a seperate Author table, and the author dropdown should be available while adding/editing a product.

Couldn't the author become the manufacturer since there is already a 1 to many relationship in this case?

2) How can ISBN be stored...I am guessing in one of the five custom fields available for Product

Yes, in a custom field

3) How can author and ISBN be included in product search? Is there any information available on how search is implemented in Konakart...1) is it simple sql search 2) is it full-text search 3) or is it Lucene based

Our next release will contain Lucene. At the moment it uses the DB to search for words in the title and or description. Custom fields can be added as constraints which should work for the ISBN. Other constraints are manufacturer (author), price and category. Product tags can also be used as filters.

[Brian]

Hi,

1) How can konakart be customized to store author name. since Author to Book is a one-to-many relationship, ideally we should have a seperate Author table

One possibility would be to use a custom field to store your author id - with the id being from your own authors table which you could add.
Another, simpler solution  is to store the author name in a custom field... but without knowing more about your project requirements it's impossible to say which might be better so these are just ideas.   It may be OK to have this de-normalisation in the product table (ie the same Author name in a custom field) because authors don't tend to change their names.  It has the advantage of course of being more compatible with KonaKart because there is no external table (which KonaKart won't know about) so there would be less to customize.

the author dropdown should be available while adding/editing a product.

You would have to write your own custom panel to provide this functionality (or ask KonaKart to provide it - which would be chargeable - write to support@konakart.com for details).  I don't know where your source data for the books comes from, (or how many books and authors etc) but perhaps there it might be easier to load the books via a program that communicates with the Admin API ?

2) How can ISBN be stored...I am guessing in one of the five custom fields available for Product

Yes, use another custom field, that makes sense.

3) How can author and ISBN be included in product search? Is there any information available on how search is implemented in Konakart...1) is it simple sql search 2) is it full-text search 3) or is it Lucene based

For the 2.2.6.0 version there is fairly comprehensive SQL search options.  Check the APIs... eg. http://www.konakart.com/javadoc/server/com/konakart/appif/ProductSearchIf.html

In our next release which is very close now, we have integrated Lucene.

-Brian

[bryant]

Thank you Brian and Trevor for the helpful reply. I like the idea of using Manufacturer as Author, and also uploading the data into the tables directly using the API's. Also, the upcoming Lucene integration sounds like a great feature.