If you are using Content Administration to develop catalogs, be aware that searches against catalogs that have not been deployed to production (preview mode) are performed slightly differently than searches against deployed catalogs. The two main differences are that in preview mode the following hold true:
The five preconfigured search components become instances of
atg.commerce.catalog.FilteringSearchFormHandlerThe
/atg/commerce/catalog/RepositoryValuescomponent becomes an instance ofatg.commerce.catalog.FilteringCatalogPossibleValues.
The following example demonstrates the different ways the two modes retrieve the same results.
In production mode: By default, the
SearchFormHandlerandCatalogPossibleValuesclasses restrict the search results to the user’s current catalog (see Processing Searches). If a user does a keyword search for “red” in production mode, the query includes a “wherekeywordStringCONTAINS ‘red’” clause and theSearchFormHandleradds another clause to make the query “wherekeywordStringCONTAINS ‘red’ andcatalogsCONTAINS (the user’s current catalog)”. Therefore, the repository would only return items that exist in the user’s current catalog.In preview mode: The
catalogsproperty of categories, products, and SKUs is derived and non-queryable. So theSearchFormHandlercannot add the extra clause to narrow the search to only the user’s current catalog. Instead, the query is run without the extra clause and items not in the user’s current catalog may be returned. Before returning the result set,FilteringCatalogSearchFormHandlerthen iterates through the results, and checks thecatalogsproperty of each. Those items that do not contain the user’s current catalog among theircatalogsare then removed from the list, and the “filtered” result set containing only items in the user’s current catalog is returned.
