Taxonomies and taxons

Taxonomies and taxons provide a robust way to classify and categorize products. They belong to the Spree::Taxonomy and Spree:Taxon models.

Administrators can define as many structures as they need from Solidus's backend. Then, they can associate individual products with any number of taxonomies or taxons using the Spree::Classification model.

Taxonomies

Use taxonomies to define the ways that you want to classify products in your store at a high level. They are the parent nodes for taxons.

The following taxonomies are common in ecommerce stores:

• Categories
• Brands

Taxons

Once the taxonomies have been established, you can start to break down the lower-level organization by adding child nodes, called taxons.

For example, if you decide to create Categories and Brands as taxons, your taxonomies might look like this:

    
      Categories
|-- Luggage
|-- Clothing
    |-- T-shirts
    |-- Socks
|-- Shoes
Brands
|-- Adidas
|-- Bentley
|-- Calvin Klein

    
  

Taxons can have child taxons. For example, a Clothing taxon may have further sub-categories like T-shirts and Socks.

Classifications and taxon management

Spree::Products become associated with taxons through the Spree::Classification model.

This model exists so that if a product is deleted, all of the links from that product to its taxons are also deleted. A similar action takes place when a taxon is deleted: all of the links to products are deleted automatically.

Using taxons in controllers and templates

Linking to a taxon in a controller or a template should be done using the spree.nested_taxons_path helper, which uses the taxon's permalink to generate a URL such as /t/categories/clothing.

Database tables

Taxons use the Nested set model for their hierarchy.

The lft and rgt properties on the Spree::Taxons model represent the locations within the hierarchy of the item. This logic is handled by the awesome_nested_set gem. See the gem's documentation for more information about these fields.