Base/virtual catalogs and related products

Hi all,
I am attempting to determine the best way to set up base and virtual catalogs and I'm having some confusion on how the related products are being handled.

We have a base catalog containing all of our available products. Originally we also had our related products defined there, but when we went to add products to a virtual catalog, it used the related products from the base... but didn't allow you to remove the relationship in the virtual catalog (which we might need to do if a related product isn't contained in this catalog). Soooo... because of this, does that mean related products are typically defined in the virtual catalog instead What if you want to create a virtual catalog that is a subset of another virtual catalog You would then run into the same issue of being unable to redefine the related products in the new virtual catalog (I tried this and confirmed this is true).

I may be making this more complicated than it is, but it seems like there would be a straightforward way to handle the related products. Am I missing something

Thanks,
Dawn

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Base/virtual catalogs and related products

tazan
Yes that is correct. If you want different related products in a different virtual catalogs dervied from the same base catalog, you would need to create the relationships on the virtual catalog product.
K. Ravinder Reddy
Hi Sudha,
Thanks for your quick response. You confirmed what I had guessed, but I was hoping the answer might be different.

We have an e-commerce site that sells books, gifts, photos, etc and many of them are related to each other by subject matter. Right now I have all products loaded into a base catalog. I've created a virtual catalog and added the majority of the base catalog products to it. We previously had all the relationships set up in the base catalog, thinking the virtual catalog settings would just "override" what was in the base - but it didn't turn out to work that way, at least in the case of related products. Our thinking was that it would save work in the long run to define them in the base catalog (i.e. one place) and depending on the virtual catalog we were creating, we could use those default related products or modify them as needed (for instance, if a specific related product was not going to be included in this particular virtual catalog). In order to have this flexibility, it sounds like we will instead need to set up our related products in each virtual catalog instead of in the base catalog. Do I understand that correctly

Dawn
Terence Tung
You cannot delete inherited relationships in Virtual Catalogs. (Inherited relationships are relationships defined in the base catalog that are included in the virtual catalog when you create a "Include rule" on the product containing the relationship.). The same also hold for Virtual Catalogs created from another virtual catalog.

Can you explain your scenario
Base/virtual catalogs and related products

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