We are looking into the usage of Virtual Catalogs to achieve the ability to place products within more than one product category and to provide special categories for popular products, new products, etc.
We need some guidance on the proper management of the Virtual Catalog vs Physical Catalog via API and best-practice in implementing this feature.
Some questions include:
Do we need to maintain the product category taxonomy within the physical catalog?
a. Alternative would be to just place the products in the physical catalog and place the taxonomy only on the virtual catalog linking products accordingly to reduce the repetitive work of maintaining both category structures.
How do you associate/un-associate and manage the relationships between the physical catalog/product and the virtual catalog/product via API?
Here you can find VirtoCommerce.Catalog module Rest API. For example, /api/catalog/listentrylinks can be used to relationships between the physical catalog/product and the virtual catalog/product.
Virto Commerce Back Office is SPA, so, you can open network tab in browser, run command and find API.
This is Aaron with Ntara. Since this is a public form i can only share limited information, however this is a project we have worked on together in the past. The Virto Catalog is fully managed by an external PIM that interfaces to Virto via API to maintain synchronization of all the category, hierarchy, product/variants, etc.
Perhaps 4k products with 25k variants.
Hopefully this helps. I will check out the documentation you have referenced.