2. Common Info

"Common Info" is information that is common to one or more pages in the Interchange User Interface (UI). There are many types of information that is common to one or more pages of the UI including information at the top of many pages such as the Go to Catalog Link, Quicklinks link, Log out link, etc. There is also information at the bottom of the page such as Version and Username. Keep in mind, as we said in the introduction, this Common Info is what you will see if you download the standard Interchange Version 4.9.7 and create a standard catalog using the "Foundation" template. Your actual store may look quite different from these examples, depending on how your Interchange developer and your company decide to implement Interchange. Lets take a look at each of them.

Common Top of Page Information

UI information at the top of the screen that is common to most of the administration area is shown above. The links include the IC Logo, Go to Catalog, Quicklinks , Apply Changes, Log out, Help and edit.

The "IC Logo" is located in the top left corner of the screen. It will normally follow you throughout the site. If you click on this Logo you will find it is also a link and it will take you to the Welcome or Main Menu screen. Use this link to easily return to the main menu at any time, from any location.

The "Go to Catalog" " link allows you to travel with one click to the index or main page of your Interchange website. This link is provided to allow you to easily view changes in the public area of your catalog that you may have made in the UI or administrative area of the catalog. An example of this might be that you just changed the price on one of your items using the Items section of the UI, and you want to make sure that the new price is displaying correctly. You could click on the "Go to Catalog" link and instantly be transported to the entry page to the public side of your catalog, where you could continue on to find the item in question and check that the price displayed is in fact what you wanted.

The "Quick Links" link allows you to display an additional and separate window containing a menu with links for the UI. This is useful to allow you to maintain a "floating" menubar on your desktop while your main browser window may be somewhere else. For example, lets say as in the example above you changed the price for an item and used the "Go to Catalog" link to view the results of your change. But prior to any work you clicked on the Quicklinks link and created a new and separate window containing the UI Quicklinks menubar. Now lets say that when you do view the item you noticed something was wrong with the description for that product. Rather than having to use your back button and search for the proper area to select the item edit, you could simply click the "Items" link on your "floating menu" and be taken directly to the item menu to perform the correction to the description.

The "Apply Changes" link allows you to "reconfigure" the Interchange catalog, which will in turn allow some changes to become effective. Many of Interchanges administrative tasks are dynamic, or take effect as soon as you make them. These include:

Edits to Database tables (ie change item price, description, size etc.)
Edits to the content of the pages, for example if you edit the index.html in the Page Edit area, once you click on Publish the changes you made are in effect.
Changes to the Menus in Menu Editor. Again, once you Publish, the changes are made active.

Other changes are static, and must be effected by reconfiguring the catalog, which in turn writes your changes to a configuration file(s). Some of the things that you will need to use the "Apply Changes" link would be:

Many of the Changes in the Administration Preferences and Commerce area, such as changes to Variables. These require you to click on the Apply Changes link.
Changes to Shipping, Tax, or Payment preferences. These require you to click on the Apply Changes link.
Any Changes to the catalog.cfg file. These require you to click on the Apply Changes link.

Finally as an aside, you may wonder what the difference between Apply Changes, and restarting the IC server is. When you Apply Changes, only changes to that specific catalog are applied. When you restart the server, changes to ALL catalogs defined in the interchange.cfg file are applied. In addition, when you restart the server all changes to the software module are implemented, such as Global and User Tag definitions, and IC Upgrades.

The "Log Out" link simply allows you to do just that, log out as a user. This will end your session with the Interchange UI. It is a good idea to log out when you are finished with your tasks.

The "Help" link is set up to link you to the appropriate help page depending on which administrative page you are currently on. For example, if you are on the default page for the Customer tab, which is Active Customers, if you click on the Help link the help screen below is displayed:

Some of the important features to note about the Help Window are the Home, FAQ; edit this topic, links and the Search Window. The Home link takes you to the index of the Help file. From there you can visit any of the many Interchange Administrative help topics that are available. The Search window allows you to search the available help topics, and the FAQ lists the Frequently Asked Questions regarding the Help Files. One of the more advanced and helpful features of the Help System itself is the "edit this help topic" link. This will allow you to actually add any information you feel might be helpful for that particular page! This could include notes to yourself regarding certain procedures, or perhaps Company procedures that should be adhered to when other Employees access certain pages and need guidance when entering data. This tool when used properly can save much time and money training or acclimating new employees.

Finally the edit link allows you to change the appearance and even the existence of the links we have just been talking about! Talk about flexible, Interchange pretty much allows you to tailor each menu to fit your needs. Along with that flexibility comes some danger for the beginner. But, Interchange is set up to prevent the beginner from making mistakes which is why, you may not even see the edit link I just described. The display of the edit links is optional, and your administrator or developer may have chosen not to display the edit links. If this is the case, and you want to change how your menu is displayed, contact your administrator. In fact, even if the edit link were displayed it would be a good idea to contact your developer BEFORE attempting to make changes. This is one of those areas that we will not get into in this manual, as it is beyond the normal scope of day-to-day activities. Suffice to say that you now know what this link does, and have been warned not to use it unless you know what you are doing. I will reinforce this statement by saying that MOST of the edit links for the menus or tabs throughout the Administrative UI should not be accessed unless you have been trained in their use.

Common Bottom of Page Information

Finally we come to the bottom of the page... whew that was a long page! Common information on the bottom of the Interchange UI includes: The Version of Interchange that you are running for your catalog, the Username of the person currently using the Administrative pages, the date, the StoreID or catalog ID, and the current directory and page that you are on. Most of this information is self-explanatory but lets look at a couple of items that bear more explanation. The Version of Interchange is self explanatory, and the word "Interchange" just prior to the Version number, is a link to the ICDevgroup website. Knowing this is useful for relaying information to your developer or admin in the case of troubleshooting. The Username is as mentioned above, the username of the person currently using the UI, it is also a link to the permissions page for that user. The permissions page allows an administrator to set permissions for each user.

The next item listed is the date, which simply shows today’s date, and then the StoreID. The StoreID is also the "catalog" name. In the example above the catalog name or StoreID is "demo1". Knowing this is useful for relaying information to your developer or admin in the case of troubleshooting. The StoreID is also a link to the main index page of the public portion of the catalog or website. Sound familiar? It should, this link has the same destination as the "Go to Catalog" link described in the earlier section. Finally, there in parenthesis is the directory location of the current page that you are on. For example, in the image above, the page being served (admin/index) would be the index page located in the admin directory. Again you may never need it, but knowing this is useful for relaying information to your developer or admin in the case of troubleshooting.

Search Boxes

Although they will do different things, search boxes are common to many of the Interchange UI pages, so we will discuss them here. We may also talk about them in other sections, but because they are so common to many pages, and because their use is similar, they need to be included in Common Info.

Above you can see a typical search box. This one is located in the Customers: Active Customers tab, or page. The search box will normally be located in the top right area of a page. Normally a search box will be used to narrow your view of possible records to edit, whether they are Customers, Items, Orders, or any of the many types of things that you can handle in Interchange. For example, if we enter the word "Bear" into the search box, the resulting display of the Customers: Active Customers page is shown below:

The search has reduced the number of "viewable" customers down to a manageable size, in this case the one customer you were searching for. This is extremely useful in finding your customer, product, order or other record when the full list may number in the hundreds or even thousands. The search boxes are very flexible, for example if you had entered "Porridge", or "Columbus" instead of "bear" in the search box, you could have gotten the same results! You may have gotten multiple results if there were other companies with the word bear or Porridge in them, but Milton Bear would have shown up on the page with any of those searches. In most cases the search boxes are set to look in all the columns for the search phrase you put in. Keep that in mind when trying to find a record.



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