Setting Up Portal Catalogs

Before you set up portal catalogs, the portal items and item categories should be set up according to the instructions provided in the portal administration guide. Portal catalogs use these same categories for organizing items on the portal.

For multi-site implementations, portal catalogs must be created in the primary site.

Create the catalog record.
1. Open the Portal Catalogs form and click the filter-in-place button.
2. Click New.
3. Specify a name and description for the new catalog.
  The status is set to Planned by default, since the catalog is in progress and not yet ready for the portal website.
4. Click Save.
Set up the catalog content.
1. On the Portal Catalogs form, click Catalog Workbench to open the Portal Catalog Workbench form.
2. Using the Select by Criteria panel, choose criteria for building the catalog. You can choose product, family, commodity, item, or category criteria. Click the Add (arrow) button to move the criteria to the catalog.
3. After criteria is moved to the grid, you can make adjustments, if necessary. Existing rows can be deleted using the toolbar Delete option, and new custom criteria rows can be added using the toolbar Add option.
  When a custom row is added, the Criteria field is set to Custom by default, and you can choose a user-extended table (UET) column from the list of entries provided in the Column field. You can then specify a value for the column. Only the Column and Value fields can be modified.
  
  For more information about UET functionality, refer to the User Extended Tables topics in the online help.
  
  Note: Rows added using the Add (arrow) button should not be modified, since they get their data from the Select by Criteria tree.
4. Click Save.
5. Click Rebuild Catalog Items or, if you plan to create multiple new catalogs, you can skip this step and build all catalogs at the same time, as specified in step 3.
  
  Note: The Item tab in the Select by Criteria panel shows all items, not just those set to active for the portal on the Items form. After you select item criteria, add it to the catalog, and build the catalog, you can see in the Catalog Items grid which items are set to Active For Portal. To include an item in the catalog, it must be set to active on the Items form. To exclude an active item from the catalog, you can select the Exclude field in the Catalog Items grid.
6. Optionally, you can schedule background processing on the Portal Catalog Build Utility form to automate the rebuilding of portal catalogs, to make sure they are kept up to date.
Repeat steps 1 and 2 for as many catalogs as necessary. You can then build all of them at the same time, using the Rebuild all Planned option on the Portal Catalog Build Utility form.
Assign catalogs to customer types and/or customers.

Note: To preview a catalog before assigning customers, in this step, assign only a test portal user account to the catalog. Next, activate the catalog and then sign in to the portal as the test user to view the catalog. If the catalog is ready, follow the remaining steps in this task.
1. On the Customer Types form, specify a default portal catalog for each customer type.
2. Optionally, on the Customers form, specify a portal catalog for selected customers. This overrides the customer type default.
If your portal allows for pre-login browsing, you can also specify a pre-login portal catalog on the Portal Parameters form. If you don’t specify a pre-login catalog, all items set to Active For Customer Portal are displayed on the portal for pre-login users.
With these steps complete, you can activate the catalog(s).