VbzCart/pieces/catalog/supplier

Supplier Catalogs are collections of items that suppliers have made available for us to purchase at wholesale prices for a given span of time (usually specified by year and sometimes season; specific ending dates are rarely given).

Since they are typically not provided in a data-oriented format that could be imported into VbzCart but rather in a print-oriented format (either a PDF of their print catalog or a hard copy thereof), I developed the Supplier Catalog Management (SC or SCM) subsystem to make it easier to manually enter print-catalog information, which is then used to update the Local Catalog (LC) data.

The basic idea is that there tend to be clusters of options and corresponding prices in any given catalog – so rather than having to key in every item type, item option (e.g. size), and corresponding prices, the SC subsystem lets you make a note of these groups and record which group or groups apply to each title in the catalog.

local data is then generated or updated by combining the following:

• SC Supplier — only some LC Suppliers provide catalogs
  • There used to be a separate table, but now we just filter for LC Suppliers that have a Price Function.
  • Eventually, we might switch to a separate flag, or LC Suppliers having one or more SC Sources.
• SC Source — Titles will only be included if they're connected to an active Source
• SC Title — the name for each set of Items; corresponds to an LC Title, which might or might not already exist
• SC Item — (short for SC Group Item) a particular item-type / item-option / price
• SC Group — a group of item-types / item-options / prices that appears in the Source