any recommendations on how to design the database model to support this?

can u be more specific about what part you are looking to model? Pricegrabber.com is pretty big.

Sorry,

what im mainly interested in is the Category filtering on the left hand side...and then when you click on a product, then click "Product Details" tab, it shows a specification table....which those category filters seem to be made from....

For instance

Video card Category http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.php/page_id=5

And then the Product Details Page http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_techspecs_full.php/masterid=16379340

I would review the schema for AdventureWorks2000 or the 2005 version of the AdventureWorks OLTP Database.

If you have SQL Server That is.

Here is the basic hierarchy:

ProductCategory 1:N ProductSubCategory ProductSubCategory 1:N Product ProductPhoto 1:N Product Product 1:N ProductReview ProductModel 1: Product ProductModel M:N ProductModelXProductDescriptionXLocale ProductDescription 1:M ProductDescriptionXLocale ProductDescriptionXLocale 1:N ProductModelXProductDescriptionXLocale

I looked at Adventure works, but i fail to see how that DB schema could give the ability to be able to filter on certain product attributes in a category as pricegrabber.com does...

Another example would be how how you can filter neweggs.com categories...then when you view a products description, you can see all the "specs"..

Ok, I missed the part about the filters. I went back to price grabber and looked closer for what you are talking about. The schema that I pointed out in adventure works shows the following data hierarchy product category, product sub category, product; e.g. Bikes -> Mountain Bikes -> Trek Model 1234. Now you could take adventure works as your starting point.

All you need to now is define product attributes, assign the attributes to groups, and then map product attribute groups to product sub categories.

Once you know the sub category, fetch all attribute groups, and for each attribite group related to the sub category fetch all attributes.

Does this help you?

i think i understand you so far....

so your saying that the product attributes would be global product attributes? So i would map the attributes not only to a sub category, but also to a product and those attributes could be to ANY product in the system..???

OK, i came up with something similarin my head, but i wanted to see if any other llblgen users had already designed something similar