In addition to the category, product, and sku items, the catalog repository includes catalog items that represent different hierarchies of categories and products. Each user is assigned one catalog, and sees the navigational structure, products and SKUs, and property values associated with that catalog. A given product may appear in multiple catalogs. The product repository item type includes a catalogs property whose value is a Set of the catalogs the product is included in.

Depending on how your catalog repository is configured, the property values of individual categories, products, or SKUs may vary depending on the catalog. If so, when you index the catalog, you may need to generate multiple records for each product or SKU (one for each catalog the item is included in).

To support creation of multiple records per product or SKU, the Guided Search integration uses the /atg/commerce/search/CustomCatalogVariantProducer component. This component is of class atg.commerce.search.producer.CustomCatalogVariantProducer, which implements the atg.repository.search.indexing.VariantProducer interface. The variant producer iterates through each catalog individually, so that each record contains only the property values associated with a single catalog.

The CustomCatalogVariantProducer component is added to the ProductCatalogOutputConfig component’s variantProducers property by default:

variantProducers+=\
   CustomCatalogVariantProducer

The mechanism used for retrieving catalog-specific property values differs depending on the property. For category, product, or sku item properties that use the atg.commerce.dp.CatalogMapDerivation class to derive catalog-specific values, the correct values are automatically obtained by that class.

To get the value of the catalogs property of the product item, the ProductCatalogOutputConfig component is configured by default to use the /atg/commerce/search/CustomCatalogPropertyAccessor component. This component is of class atg.commerce.search.producer.CustomCatalogPropertyAccessor, which implements the atg.repository.search.indexing.PropertyAccessor interface. This accessor returns, for each record, only the specific catalog the record applies to. The accessor is specified in the /atg/commerce/endeca/index/product-sku-output-config.xml definition file:

<item is-multi="true" property-name="catalogs"
   property-accessor="customCatalog">

The CustomCatalogPropertyAccessor component is mapped to the name customCatalog by the ProductCatalogOutputConfig component’s propertyAccessorMap property:

propertyAccessorMap+=\
   customCatalog=CustomCatalogPropertyAccessor