Consolidating Categories
Use
If the taxonomy hierarchy has too much detail so that there are too many child categories of a particular parent category, each with a small number of records, you can consolidate child categories into a single parent category.
Consolidating categories is the flip side of partitioning. In partitioning, new child categories are created for each value of a specified attribute. In consolidating, child categories are eliminated and their names become the text values of a new text attribute.
When you use the Consolidate Children command to consolidate the children of a parent category, MDM does the following (figure below):
· Removes the child categories from the tree.
· Creates a new attribute called Children of parent and links it to the parent category.
· Reassigns each record that was previously assigned to each of the children to the parent.
· Assigns as the value of the new attribute the name of the child category to which the record was originally assigned.
Any products assigned to the internal leaf node child of the parent category are assigned a NULL value for the new attribute created as a result of the Consolidate Children command.
Procedure
To consolidate the children of a category:
1. In the taxonomy tree, select the parent category whose children you want to consolidate.
2. Right-click on the category and choose Consolidate Children from the context menu, or choose Tree ® Consolidate Children from the main menu.
MDM removes the child categories from the tree, and creates and links a new attribute to the parent category.
Consolidate Categories Constraints
Operation |
Constraints |
Consolidate Children |
· Must be Taxonomy mode · Tree must have focus · Root node cannot be consolidated · Node must have at least two children · Children of the node cannot have children · Children of the node cannot be an alias · Children of the node cannot have a matching set · All children of the node must have the same set of attributes |