ATG Consumer Commerce comes with a default set of product catalog item types that most stores will find useful. These include product, category, and SKU. However, you may find that you need to extend the standard product catalog definition to meet the needs of your site. You may want to add additional properties to the item types included in ATG Consumer Commerce or add new item types that are specific to your needs. ATG Consumer Commerce is very flexible and makes these types of customizations to the product catalog easy to do.
To implement the specialized features of the Pioneer Cycling site, we extended the basic ATG Consumer Commerce product catalog definition in three main ways. This chapter includes the following sections:
Background
Explains what you need to know in order to extend the catalog.
Adding Properties to Product Definition
We added simple properties (or attributes) to item types already defined in ATG Consumer Commerce. For example, we added the propertystyleto theproductitem type.
Adding New Item TypesWe added new item types to hold
productandSKUproperty values that can’t be stored in a single, simple property. Adding a new item type is necessary if a product or SKU property value cannot be represented as a simple string or number.
Creating SubtypesWe created new item types by subclassing the
productandSKUitem types. This allowed us to create new attributes for just one subtype if desired
