[ic] products using inactive

[interchange-users@icdevgroup.org (Barry Treahy, Jr.)]

Mike Heins wrote:

>Quoting Barry Treahy, Jr. (Treahy@MMaz.com):
>  
>
>>Philip S. Hempel wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Just befor I pull my har out, does the usage
>>>of the inactive function through interchange
>>>or is it built by me into the webstore?
>>>
>>>I don't want to start off looking in the
>>>wrong location to make this work for
>>>me
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>I just did a grep on the sources for the key word inactive and with the 
>>exception of the UI for customers, I saw nothing so my initial guess is 
>>that it would be a feature that you would need to build into your site...
>>    
>>
>
>You won't find that many hardcoded field names in the IC core. Almost all
>that are there can be remapped.
>
Good morning Mike...

This is meants as a learning question for me, not to 'question' you; But 
if there is a fielded defined in a table, that is instrumental to the 
logical or processing of IC, then at one point or another would there 
not have to be a hard coded reference to that field, be that in IC or 
one of the Vend libraries?  Putting aside the inactive column and 
looking at something more fundamental like price for example?

My reason for asking is that I often grep the core program and libraries 
to try and better understand how a field or tag might interact and 
relate to other actions in IC.  If this approach is flawed, what could 
you recommend to aid in the Q/A process so that folks like me that are 
in a 'perpetual' ramp up on IC don't have to bug the list frequently 
with what might otherwise be considered mundane or novice questions?

>There is a new feature in IC4.9/5.0, called HIDE_FIELD. It automatically
>blocks records where a field contains a true value for searches and such.
>
Perhaps you could expand on this further?  Blocks fields, or entire 
rows?  This could be extremely useful as some products that we list can 
only be seen by US customers, others only by International customers, 
yet the standard search could find both on the same search.  A crude 
example that really doesn't apply to our products but presume prior to 
switching power supplies, you could have two blenders, one at 120VAC 
60Hz and a second at 240VAC 50Hz.  To show both could create confusion. 
 In our case, I have four new columns in our product table that searchs 
must use to include/exclude records depending on who they are:
 allow_us        allow_uk        allow_intl      allow_disty

Are you stating that 4.9 could/would make these process more automated 
and if so, is it worth be attempting to pull from the CVS to snag that 
portion and attempt to integrate it into 4.8.5 now?

Thanks for your time...

Barry

-- 

Barry Treahy, Jr  *  Midwest Microwave  *  Vice President & CIO 

E-mail: Treahy@mmaz.com * Phone: 480/314-1320 * FAX: 480/661-7028