Keeping Categories or Sub Categories from appearing in the left-hand nav (products by first letter)

Greetings,
Our customer has requested that they be able to group products by the first letter in their product name. They also requested having alphabetical links separated by a pipe in a fashion such as A | B | C | D ... and so on. Our initial thought was to just add Categories for each letter and they could associate each product with the letter but that produced a large number of categories in the left-hand nav. The second thought was to use sub-categories but this produced about 26 sub categories which also led to a lot of scrolling. We tried to make the categories and sub categories not published (this way the products could be associated with a category) so that we could link to that page by way of the filename and query string, but selecting not published just meant that the page wouldn't show and in turn directed everyone back to the homepage.

Can anyone think of an easy solution to this using the built-in NOP admin functionality (possibly nav attributes) so that we wouldn't have to re-compile/push) the .dlls?

Thanks in advance.

Just to answer my own question (in case anyone else runs into this problem) I was able to accomplish what I was hoping to do with Product Tagging. It still give me a unique url by way of a Query String and doesn't put it in the Nav. This really is a cool product!
Thanks!

Hi,
can you let us know how you fixed this.

Thanks,
Prasad.

Hi,

I have some query regarding category navigation display on home page. I modified the main categories in header menu and want to show the categories and sub categories in left navigation when ever the user click on some category in header menu.

For now its happening that if i click on category A , it expands the parent and subcategories associated to category A. However i don't want to show rest of the categories for that particular instance.

I believe that there will be change in CategoryNavigation.ascx.cs , Any guidance in code changes  !!!

Briefly,

I just want to show that category and associated sub categories in left menu which a user clicked in head menu.

Looking for response

Thanks  

adeel

Hi Prasad, I just put in 26 "product tags" into the system, and I tag each product with the first letter of the product. I then link to them with a query string for the product tag. It is an interesting workaround but it works! Hope this helps.
Thanks.

Hey everybody - after reading this topic I worked out a SQL query to do this for me and I just thought I'd share it

Insert Into ProductTag(Name, ProductCount)
select SUBString(Product.Name,1,1), COUNT(*) from Product
Group By SUBString(Product.Name,1,1)

Insert Into Product_ProductTag_Mapping(ProductTag_Id,Product_Id)
select ProductTag.Id, Product.Id from Product, ProductTag
where SUBString(Product.Name,1,1) = ProductTag.Name