How the Catalog is Organized

The UltraCart Catalog System has many different objects interacting to create the web page that your customer experiences. In this chapter, we will cover the basis of how the catalog operates to give you some context to begin learning the technical details.

Catalogs are organized in a hierarchy of levels know as groups. When a customer enters a URL on your website, UltraCart parses the URL to determine the group that the customer is requesting. The system then fetches all the data associated with the group and passes it through a rendering system. The rendering system uses the Velocity scripting language written in the templates to process the data. The output is the web page that the end user sees.

Each group within a catalog has two templates associated with it: group view and item view. If the customer requests the URL /products/dvd/ within your catalog, then it would render the page with the group view. If the customer requested the URL /products/dvd/sony-brdvd2001.html, it would render the item template associated with the group for the particular item ID specified at the end of the URL.

The bulk of a site is rendered using templates and the group hierarchy, but there are two other ways to have additional pages on your site. The first way is with an arbitrary page which is a template located at a specific URL. For example, a pop-up image gallery might be an arbitrary page /products/popupGallery.html. The second way is a static HTML page that is located on the virtual FTP server. By having a virtual FTP server available for your catalog, you can store HTML, images, CSS, JavaScript, movie files, and more on your website just like traditional hosting environments.