Multi Layer filtering products

Hi guys,

My company creates custom e-shops for car part dealers and I am assessing whether a migration to nopcommerce would be possible. Ideally, our goal is to implement business logic without altering nopcommerce views, since our customers probably will use different themes. Another requirement is ; everything we develop will be as a plugin, unless we can contribute it to the project.

One of our main features is a widget which helps the end-user to pick step by step ; first its car manufacturer (make), then its car model and lastly its engine type so we can filter Products (car parts) by the Engine Type. At every step viewing only the compatible suggestions.

The only way I have found to represent this tree (Make > Model > Engine Type) is through Categories, which I don't think it is suitable because then we need another way to represent actual Categories.

Another option would be to ignore the tree, and simply represent Engine Type with a Specification Attribute. However, UI elements for Specification Attributes are designed to support a small number of Options and our database contains over 1500 different Engine Types.

Additionally, we can't use Manufacturers to represent Car Makes (like in trackion) because Parts already have Manufacturers which many a time are different from the Manufacturer of the car.

Do you have any recommendations ?

PS: Pardon my English, I am currently familiarizing myself with the language.

Thanks in advance,
Kostas Alexopoulos

Check this plugin: https://www.nopcommerce.com/p/1882/nop-car-parts-filter.aspx

Tecnofin,

Thanks for the recommendations, I have contacted the author of the plugin and I am currently waiting for a reply.

In the meanwhile I am inspecting Product Tags. They seem to fit our requirements, we can use our services to feed the selection to a widget and then the widget will use a mapping to select the appropriate ProductTag ids.

One thing I have yet to find is the way to filter Products both by Category and ProductTag. Maybe a custom route (for example "{category_name}?tags=<ids-comma-separated>") and a custom CatalogController or an IProductService implementation will provide the desired behavior.

Any thoughts on that?

Thanks in advance,
Kostas Alexopoulos