Connected Product Catalog Links on Category Pages

Question

I have followed this technet tutorial on how to create a catalog site collection and a publishing site collection as well as how to turn the list into a product catalog and connect it on the publishing site.

After connecting my catalogs the corresponding Category and Catalog Item pages are created, i.e. for my Educational Resources list the following Pages are created:

• Category-Educational-Resources
• CatalogItem-Educational-Resources

The category itself in the metadata term set is called Educational Resources. If I click Educational Resources in the top nav it directs me to myurl/educational-resources, as expected and displays the two items that exist in that catalog (will contain more once I get it working).

If I click on one of the items it takes me too myurl/educational-resources/1/EDR1Educational%20Resources

The form it is to follow it ItemGroup/ItemNumber, but the item number is only EDR1 and I cannot figure out why each category and their items is appending the Item Category to the end of the URL for items, in my example above 'Educational Resources', the Item Category, was appended to the end.

Accessing this URL brings up a blank page. If I modify the url to be myurl/educational-resources/1/EDR1 I see the catalog item details as you'd expect.

Can anyone tell me why the search index (and thus the category links) are pointing to the wrong URL and how I can fix this so that the item category is not appended to the end of the URLs?

I have published a major version for both the category and item pages.

Update as per comment regarding search results

You can see in the screenshot that the Item Category is being appended to the end of the URL when being indexed (my guess). I have tried manually defining the URL format on the catalog connection as: myUrl/[ProductCatalogGroupNumberOWSTEXT]/[ProductCatalogItemNumberOWSTEXT]

The Construct a URL format was: myUrl/Term Root/Term/[ProductCatalogGroupNumberOWSTEXT]/[ProductCatalogItemNumberOWSTEXT]

Update with screenshots showing what I get when using Construct a URL format from catalog properties Page I see when clicking an item:

Page I'd expect to see and do when I remove the appended category from URL:

I appreciate all the help, Thanks, Devin

Answer 1

After working through things with @Rothrock I started thinking, maybe the property I am using for the item number isn't right. I wanted to see what the value is and came across how to view managed property value using search rest api.

Based on that I accessed the content type and property I wanted (actually shows all properties): _myUrl/api/search/query?querytext=%27contenttype:Educational%20Resources%27&selectproperties=%27ProductCatalogItemNumberOWSTEXT%27

Scrolling through I found the following in the XML:

<d:element m:type="SP.KeyValue">
    <d:Key>ProductCatalogItemNumberOWSTEXT</d:Key>
    <d:Value>EDR2 Educational Resources</d:Value>
    <d:ValueType>Edm.String</d:ValueType>
</d:element>
<d:element m:type="SP.KeyValue">
    <d:Key>UsageAnalyticsId</d:Key>
    <d:Value>EDR2</d:Value>
    <d:ValueType>Edm.String</d:ValueType>
</d:element>

As it turns out ProductCatalogItemNumberOWSTEXT isn't what I wanted. Changing my URL structure to use UsageAnalyticsId instead made it work as expected. To me that seems deceiving and I do not believe this was mentioned in any tutorial I read.

So if I construct my URL after connecting the catalog I can select UsageAnalyticsId (cannot select this on the catalog site). This makes the URL example underneath appear as:

myUrl/Term Root/Term/[ProductCatalogGroupNumberOWSTEXT]/[UsageAnalyticsId]

And gives me the desired result.