Ecommerce site w/multiple subdomains

rubyonrails-talk
1

My company is looking at redoing our legacy Classic ASP storefront, and I'm thinking about doing it in Rails since the alternative is to use a PHP-based solution called Magento that, while it looks nice, is insanely abstract to the point of making me go blind (it uses a database design principle called Entity-Attribute-Value or EAV which basically is to keep database tables like hashmaps that can contain an infinite number of values).

The principle requirement of this site is to be able to filter certain products based on the subdomain, since we want to have different "brands". The products aren't specific to this subdomain, but the subdomain only shows a subset of products.

For example:

www.mysite.com: displays all products with categories/subcategories (i.e. no filtering) furniture.mysite.com: displays only products/subcategories with a parent category of furniture green.mysite.com: displays only products/categories/subcategories with a (boolean) flag recycled = true

How would I go about doing this? The only way I can think would be to have separate controllers for each "store", for example:

# Main store i.e. no subdomain class StoreController < ApplicationController   def index     @products = Products.find(:all)   end end

# furniture.mysite.com class FurnitureStoreController < ApplicationController   def index     @products = Products.find_all_by_category('Furniture')   end end

# green.mysite.com class GreenStoreController < ApplicationController   def index     @products = Products.find_all_by_recycled(true)   end end

But that seems rather unweildy. This is a critical business requirement since we want to create different stores with their own unique look and feel, but the actual data displayed comes from one master database and needs to be filtered appropriately based on the store the user is browsing.

Another critical requirement we have is that each individual product can have up to four prices, and the price is chosen based on the "store" the user is viewing it on (e.g. Product A is $15.00 on the mysite.com, but $12.00 on furniture.mysite.com). I'm not sure what the best way to tackle that problem would be.

Any assistance with either or both of these issues would be greatly appreciated!

2

But that seems rather unweildy. This is a critical business requirement since we want to create different stores with their own unique look and feel, but the actual data displayed comes from one master database and needs to be filtered appropriately based on the store the user is browsing.

Just the first thing that springs to mind.

in your product class do

named_scope :green, ... named_scope :recycled, ...

def self.scope_for_subdomain(subdomain)   send case subdomain   when 'green' then :green   when 'recycled' then :recycled   else     :all   end end

and then your index action is

Product.scope_for_subdomain(request.subdomains.first).find :all You could also just use anonymous scopes

Depending on what's in your app it might be better to pull the selecting of the scope out into a before filter.

Another critical requirement we have is that each individual product can have up to four prices, and the price is chosen based on the "store" the user is viewing it on (e.g. Product A is $15.00 on the mysite.com, but $12.00 on furniture.mysite.com). I'm not sure what the best way to tackle that problem would be.

Again a random thought: products have a base price, and you have a price_overrides table (products has_many price_overrides etc...) Assuming you have Store objects describing the stores and a filter that sets the current store you could have a method in your product class similar to

def overriden_price(store)   override = price_overrides.find_by_store_id store   override ? override.price : self.price end

and when you want to display the price to a user you just do

product.overriden_price(@current_store)

Fred