Properties Vs Option Types Vs Taxonomies

[Nitesh Thadani]

Hi All, 

I have just started to build an eCommerce portal using Spree commerce. One of the key features would be faceted search within the application. 

I am unable to decide wether an attribute of a product should be created as a Taxonomy or a Property specifically when that will be needed for 'Faceted Search'. 

As an example, I need to associate each product with a "Material" attribute. The Material value could be (Cotton, Silk or Leather). Not sure if the right way to create the attribute would be to create a property called "Material' or create taxonomies (like Material -> Cotton Material -> Silk, Material -> Leather). 

1) Material will be one of the key faceted on which filtering will be based. In which case should it be a taxonomy rather than a property? (In the example provide Brand and Category are both taxonomies rather than properties)

2) If it is a property, can we create a property with a list of value rather than free text? (Any extensions available?)

3) In the event i want to make a property a search facet in the future, is that easily possible? 

4) I have an option type colour. Is it possible to create facets / filtering based on the option types?

Thanks in advance

Regards 

Nitesh Thadani 

[Ryan Bigg]

Hi Nitesh,

Option Types and Properties inside of Spree are very similar concepts, but they serve different purposes. 

Option Types define the ways that the different variants of your product can differ. For instance, an Option Type on one Variant may be "Color", with that Option Value for that Option Type on that Variant being "Red". On another variant, it might be "Green".

Properties define the common properties for all variants of a product, and so things like "Material" would be suitable for this. 

Taxonomies on the other hand are for categorising groups of products. You may have a Taxonomy called "Clothing" and underneath that have a Taxon called "Shirts" and another one called "Jackets".

For more information about these things, I'd recommend reading the Products guide, which takes about Option Types, Properties and Taxonomies/Taxons in greater detail: http://guides.spreecommerce.com/developer/products.html.

I hope that explains those things.

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[Nate Lowrie]

+1 on what Ryan said. Properties like material belong in the Spree Properties. I do believe that Spree as Ransack support built in to search on those properties, but don't quote me on that. Maybe @radar can answer that one.

[Ryan Bigg]

Yes we do have scopes for that:

Spree::Product.with_property_value('Material', 'Cotton')

Look in https://github.com/spree/spree/blob/2-1-stable/core/app/models/spree/product/scopes.rb for more examples.