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|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|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
