4.2. catalog.cfg

For the rest of the tutorial, most of the files mentioned do not exist yet. You will create them yourself with initial text we give.

You need to create a catalog.cfg file for your tutorial store (in the tutorial catalog directory). We'll start with a very simple products database table with a few fields and a few products.

The Database directive describes a database table to the Interchange system in this format:

  Database  name  filename  format

Interchange has several database options available. We will use the simplest, which is the built-in default (specifically, some variant of DBM). The default location for filename is in a subdirectory called products under the catalog directory. Interchange recognizes a number of file formats. We will use a tab-delimited text file. Enter the following into catalog.cfg:

  Database  products  products.txt  TAB

This tells Interchange that you have a database table named 'products' that is described in a tab-delimited file named products.txt. You can describe an unlimited number of arbitrary database tables for the system to use this way. Interchange keeps a list of default tables called "Product Files," reflecting its e-commerce roots. You can specify all of the database tables that contain products by using the ProductFiles directive. There is no default for this, so you will have to specify your products table's name by adding the following line to catalog.cfg:

  ProductFiles  products

There are a few other directives that Interchange expects to see in order to complete the minimum configuration. They are VendURL, SecureURL, and MailOrderTo. They are, respectively, your catalog's base URL, its secure URL, and the e-mail address to mail order notices to. Add the following lines to catalog.cfg to establish these directives:

  VendURL  http://localhost/cgi-bin/tutorial
  SecureURL  http://localhost/cgi-bin/tutorial
  MailOrderTo  your@email.address

The catalog.cfg file should look like this when you save it:

  Database  products  products.txt  TAB
  ProductFiles  products
  VendURL  http://localhost/cgi-bin/tutorial
  SecureURL  http://localhost/cgi-bin/tutorial
  MailOrderTo  your@email.address