Setting up a collection relationship for parent-child relationships

What for?

In some categories (jewellery, apparel for example), it might be interesting for you to build an additional collection relationship between your items. This collection relationship will help the customer to find the bracelet that goes well with the necklace, the bra that goes well with the panties…

This feature has to be used for items of the same product line only.

It will result in:

+ Collection parent
    + Item parent
        -    Items
    + Item parent
        -    Items

Requirements

In order to build a collection relationship, you need to:
-    Understand how does a normal color, size, colorsize, scent, […] relationship works
-    Have a basic XML knowledge (enough to create an XML file)

How to?

Preamble

Assuming you already have relationships properly set for your items like:

+ Necklace ‘Cleopatra’ parent (SKU ‘Parent001’)
-    Necklace ‘Cleopatra’ size 1 (SKU ‘N001’)
-    Necklace ‘Cleopatra’ size 2 (SKU ‘N002’)
+ Ring ‘Cleopatra’ parent (SKU ‘Parent002’)
-    Ring ‘Cleopatra’ size 1 (SKU ‘R001’)
-    Ring ‘Cleopatra’ size 2 (SKU ‘R002’)
-    Ring ‘Cleopatra’ size 5 (SKU ‘R005’)

Assuming you have all descriptive data loaded for those items (title + description + pictures)

You now have to link the ‘collection’ parents to the ‘item’ parents like this:

+ Product line ‘Cleopatra’ Jewellery (SKU ‘PLParent00A’)-    Parent001
-    Parent002

No need to submit any other info neither for the product parents, nor for the children: title, description etc. are already stored in our database.

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Technical part

Creating the collection relationship

You now have to create an XML feed to create this relationship.

It’ll basically look like:

Download RI-01.xml

Creating image content for relationship parents

You now have to create an XML feed to upload images for the relationship parent.

It’ll basically look like:

Download RI-02.xml

Final display