Ecommerce site w/multiple subdomains

Rails
#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

On Dec 1, 7:27 pm, Wayne M [email protected] wrote:

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