Categories

The Categories area holds the structure of your range. You reach it through the Categories navigation entry.

Instead of a list you see a tree here, because a category only gets its meaning from its position in it: Wall paint on its own says little, Interior paints / Wall paint says everything. The Filter field, the Filter By button and the pager are therefore absent. In a tree you built yourself you find your way without them.

What role the category plays in the data model and how a product is assigned to one is described in the data model.

Overview / tree

The tree shows the root categories, each with an arrow in front of it where it has subcategories. A click on the arrow expands and collapses a branch, a click on the name selects the category. Sorting is by name on every level, ascending.

At most one category is selected at any time, and the selection decides what the toolbar above does: four of its five buttons are grayed out without one.

Category tree with the Interior paints category selected and expanded

New creates a category below the selected one, and without a selection a new root category. It is the only one of the five buttons that works without a selection. Edit opens the category in the detail view, Delete removes it after a confirmation, and Expand All and Collapse All expand and collapse the branch below the selected category in full.

Where a category hangs in the tree is settled when it is created: the selection in the tree determines the parent category.

Delete reaches further than the confirmation suggests:

The subcategories are deleted with it, and their subcategories as well.
The products stay. They only lose their assignment to this category. TRADElube marks them as changed while doing so, so the change goes into the connected systems on the next execution.
Links from other categories to this one disappear, and the categories affected are marked as changed too.

Detail view

The detail view shows a single category. At the very top sits the save bar, below it the Active field, and after that the collapsible sections Description, Category Links, Properties and Channels.

The Active field marks whether the category is carried. A new category is active by itself. What a connected system makes of it is up to the channel: with an online shop it usually becomes the category's visibility in the menu.

Detail view of a category with the Active field and the four collapsed sections

Description

This section holds everything that gets translated, and here that includes the Name field. That is the difference from the manufacturer, whose name is an ordinary field: a category is called something else in the English shop than in the German one, a brand is not.

Description section of a category with the translatable Name field

The tabs at the top of the section switch between the language versions, and you create a further one with the Insert button. The tabs appear only from the second version onwards, and the default language cannot be deleted. Details under languages and translations.

Field	Meaning	Note
Name	The category's designation	Appears in the tree and in the breadcrumb at the top. One per language version
Short Description	The short text about the category	Switchable between a formatted view (Visual) and the HTML behind it (Html)
Description	The full text a shop shows above the article list	Switchable in the same way

The Meta Description subsection holds the Meta Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords fields for search engines.

Meta Description subsection of the category with its three search engine fields

Category links

The section points from this category to other categories in the same client. It has two states, like the Categories section on the product: in its normal state only the linked categories are shown, and only the Edit button brings in the full tree with a checkbox in front of every node.

Category links section in its normal state with the single linked category

Edit switches to the full tree with checkboxes. The button then reads End Edit and switches back. Expand All and Collapse All expand and collapse the tree. Move Up and Move Down move a linked category within the order and are the only two that require a selected link.

The links stay inside the client, where they are available for analysis or for an adjustment on your channel. What you want to achieve with them is best discussed with us.

Category links section after Edit, with the full tree and checkboxes

Properties

The section shows the properties set up for categories, each with the input field of its type. Properties without a group sit at the top, followed by one collapsible block per group.

The section exists only if there are any properties for categories at all. If it is missing, that is not a permission problem: there is nothing to show. Properties are set up under Settings, through the Properties button, and explained under properties.

Properties section of the category with the yes/no attribute In Main Menu

Channel mappings

The Channels section shows which connected systems the category is linked to, one row per channel. Structure, fields and buttons are the same as on the product and are described there in detail: products. What a channel mapping is in the first place is described under channel mappings.

Channels section with three channel mappings and three different forms of identifier

The Mapping column looks different on every channel. In the image the file-based channel shows the name, Shopware a long identifier and WooCommerce a running number. That is not a defect but the identifier under which each system carries the category. TRADElube remembers it so the next execution finds the same category again.

This table too sits in a box that can be scrolled. The image shows Channel, Mapping and Executed At. The Changes At and State columns sit to their right.