custom sidebars, has something to do with mapping?

[sixrfan]

hi, i'm looking to take over a website where the previous person left off. i have no experience with aspdotnet shopping cart software so bear with me if my questions seem amateurish.

we are currently running version 8.0 but plan to upgrade to the latest version, 9.3.1.

our site sells menswear. our objective is to create custom sidebars that are only relevant to whatever product category the website visitor is on. for instance, when a visitor is on a shoe product page or shoe category page, we want a list in the sidebar of all the shoe subcategories. and when someone is on a tie product page or tie category page, we want a sidebar list of all tie subcategories to appear. is that possible? if so, how easy/difficult is that to setup? i think i has something to do with "mapping" though I'm not entirely sure what mapping is just yet.

please advise. thanks in advance!

[Old Pedant]

??? Will the sidebar be *PART* of the ASP.NET page or will it be an <iframe> and so semi-independent of the page?

If it is part of the page, why is there even a question? The category of the page is "shoes" so you simply use a SQL query that gets all subcategories of "shoes". If the category is "pants", you get subcategories of "pants".

All this means is that your DB design has to be correct, so that your SQL statement becomes

String SQL = "SELECT * FROM subcategories WHERE category = " + currentPageCategory;

(tha't's C#. VB.Net nearly identical)