[mv] master/slave catalogs - (products & checkout)

[Dave Barr <barrd@cricinfo.com>]

******    message to minivend-users from Dave Barr <barrd@cricinfo.com>     ******

Hi MiniVenders,

[Debian 2.2 / MiniVend 4.04]

I'm hoping that someone might be able to help/advise me as to the 
best course of action regarding LARGE numbers of catalogs (in time 
several thousand, ulp ;).

After reading through the dox and hours spent reading through the 
archives I haven't come across any real answers regarding running a 
master catalog and hanging slaves from it. I like the idea as I will 
be sharing the HTML pages driven as templates and most of the 
database files (esp shipping, & userdb).
However the only real differences between the shops will be the 
products that they carry (easily changed by altering the ProductFiles 
directive, or so I thought ;)

Having created 3 shops as a test the basket page will pick up the sku 
of any orders placed in any other shop in the chain - but as each 
shop has its own unique products file it 'obviously' doesn't have the 
supporting price, description etc. (This (the sku) I presume is 
gleaned from the session db for the master catalog?). I actually want 
each shop to be an autonomous unit, so that from entry page through 
checkout to receipt follows its own template variables and only 
reflects its own unique products (and maybe those of the master cart, 
again easily sorted with the ProductFiles directive). Has anyone 
worked out a workaround for removing unwanted products from other 
carts using the master/slave model for this? Or is it indeed possible?

Talking of which, can anyone explain why using this model that no 
matter which shop you are going through when clicking for "Check Out" 
it will always default to the master catalog (inheriting its template 
variables et al), yet the basket page (as specified under "Special" 
pages in the master catalog file) is called in exactly the same way 
i.e.

[snip catalog.cfg]
SpecialPage          checkout       __ORDER_STYLE__/checkout
SpecialPage          order          __ORDER_STYLE__/basket
[/snip]

I assume this is "hard coded" somewhere deep within the MiniVend lib routines?

Any help, abuse, comments or workarounds welcome at this point  ;)
thanks for your time.
Regards

Dave Barr

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