Question

I have a quick question in regards to the approach to displaying products on an e-commerce package I am putting together. The problem that I facing is that I would like visitors of the site narrow their search.

For example, a use case would be:

1. A Visitor is currently browsing a season of products (eg. Summer Collections)
2. He / She should then be able to filter by category and brand within that season, so for example they might decide that they only want to see Pants from Clothes Galore.

The problem, I ma facing is that doing a single SQL query in order to find products that match all three of these factors (so the product is in the summer collection, is a pair of pants and made by clothes galore). The thing that makes this overly difficult is that products can be in multiple categories and seasons. So there would need to be an insane amount joins in order to grab the right result.

My database structure is as follows:

product -> product_category <- category
product -> product_season <- season
product <- brand (a product can only be made by one brand)

Hope someone can share their wisdom on this…

Answer 1

If you have a big catalog, you might be better to use Apache Solr ( http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ ). Otherwise, there are a few approaches.

You don’t need the overhead and straight SQL isn’t that insane, will perform reasonably well:

SELECT product.*
FROM product
LEFT JOIN product_category
LEFT JOIN category
LEFT JOIN product_season
LEFT JOIN season
WHERE season = ? AND category = ?

Alternatively, If you don’t like the number of rows returned, you can aggregate the category and season into the product table (new columns), then use like queries to find things:

SELECT product.*
FROM product
where product.categories like '% category %'
  and product.seasons like '% season %'