[ic] Alternate Pricing

[Thomas J.M. Burton]

Hello all,

I'm setting up a catalog for a client who offers a few different specials to
targeted audiences (via e-mail or other means). I originally set this up by
creating a field for each special which contains the item's price through
that offer. This would allow me to do a search for all items containing a
non-zero price in the specified field and generate a page containing all
items offered under a particular special.

Example:
sku    description    special1    special2    special3    price
001    item one       0           50.25       0           60.99
002    item two       18.50       19.95       0           25.00
etc...


There are several product categories in this catalog, each having its own
datatable. Each of these is specified in the ProductFiles directive. I'm
using Interchange 4.6.5 with a MySQL database.


I've encountered two problems:

1. I'm not sure of how I'll have the special price substituted for the
regular price. I had thought that I might be able to do this by setting up a
Locale for each of the three specials and setting the corresponding
PriceField in each one. Unless you can set a locale for an individual item,
that won't work.

In short how can I use an alternate price for an item based on the page it
is ordered from? I suppose I could use the pricing table, but I'd prefer to
keep the alternate price fields in the individual product tables themselves
if possible.


2. Searching for all products with a non-zero price in the special2 field,
for example, only returns products from one of the product tables.
Formatting of my search is:

st=sql/se=0/ne=yes/sf=special2

Unless I'm mistaken, by not specifying a searchfile, it should search
through all files listed in the ProductFiles directive. Either I'm missing
something in my search specs or I should be going about this in a different
way. Suggestions?


I hope I explained all of that clearly enough and provided all necessary
info. Thanks in advance for any help. :)

-Tom Burton