inRiver

Building Category Trees Based on inRiver Data

In inRiver you can create categories using CVL (Controlled Vocabulary List). One level navigation as well as multilevel navigation can be created in inRiver. Categories together with the assigned products can be imported from inRiver to Sana to automatically build the main menu of the Sana web store and catalog. 

The process of creating navigation in inRiver is the following:

• for the root level of navigation, you need to have a CVL which isn't linked to any parent
• for the second level of navigation, you need to have a CVL which has parent of root CVL
• for the third level of navigation, you need to have a CVL which has parent of second level CVL

So, for example, there are the following categories (CVLs): Industry, MainCategory, SubCategory. In this case, Industry is the root category and it does not have a parent, MainCategory is the second level of navigation and it is linked to Industry and  SubCategory is the third level of navigation and it is linked to MainCategory.

You can create as many levels of navigation as you want, but take into consideration that the management of the web store navigation with numerous levels is complicated and it might break the web store design.

To create the navigation in inRiver and use it in the Sana web store, you need to create a server string.

Step 1: Open the inRiver Product Model and in the Fields section create a field of a CVL type. You will need the CVL value of this field to create a server setting.

Step 2: Go to the Settings in the inRiver Control Center and create the SANA_HIERARCHY_CVLS server setting.

To create a setting string, you first should decide how many levels of navigation you need to support.

It will determine how many CVLs will take part in the category tree building, one CVL per one level of navigation. If you, for example, have 3 levels of navigation, you will need to put 3 CVLs into a setting.

To create a setting string, combine all CVLs identifiers in order they should appear in a category tree, separating them with semicolon.

Before creating a setting string, make sure that your categories are linked. For example, you have Industry (1st level of navigation), MainCategory (2nd level of navigation) and SubCategory (3rd level of navigation). In this case, Industry should be a root category and it should not have a parent, all categories from MainCategory should be linked to the Industry categories and categories from SubCategory should be linked to the MainCategory categories.

If the categories are linked, create a setting string. The string should look like this:

Industry;MainCategory;SubCategory

 NOTE

Make sure that the CVL identifiers are spelled correctly. For example, if you write MainCategory1 instead of MainCategory, then this category and the categories of the next level will not be imported to Sana.

You need to add the setting string you created to the value of the SANA_HIERARCHY_CVLS server setting.

So, in the following way you can build the category tree in inRiver. In the next article you will learn how to link products to the relevant categories and import them to Sana.