Our company has a base catalog containing all our categories and products. Some products belong to more than one category. We would like to exclude some categories from the site for certain customers so we created virtual catalogs having the appropriate exclusions. However, we have encountered a problem in that any product within an excluded category is no longer available in the virtual catalog even though that product is also within a category that has not been excluded.
I am curious if this behavior is this by design
Problem while excluding category from virtual catalog
VoiceOfExperience
SMaia
Unfortunately, this is the default behavior for exclusion rules in virtual catalogs. According to the on-line docs "When you define an exclusion rule on an item, all descendants of that item are excluded from the virtual catalog. Exclusion rules take precedence over inclusion rules. For example, suppose you have a book that is a member of two categories, "Fiction" and "Historical Novels". If you have a rule that includes "Fiction" and another rule that excludes "Historical Novels", your book will not be included in the virtual catalog." One way around this to to use inclusion rules for each category you want rather than exlusion rules for each category you don't want.
I hope this helps.
Jeff Lynch
MVP Windows Server System - Commerce Server
http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeff.lynch