Suggestions on "finding a product"?

[Bradley]

I am most definitely NOT a UI/UX developer (I try to stick to the invisible stuff behind the scenes), but I've been tasked with developing a quick web page (ASP.NET Core 5 MVC, in case it matters) in which a user can look up the price of a product.  I have a database of nearly a million products.  I would like this thing to be responsive.  Obviously I could simply provide a search box and do it that way, but the products are broken up into five levels of a hierarchy.  It would be possible (and relatively easy) to create a page with cascading drop-downs.  However I'd prefer something even more flexible, preferably combining the best of all worlds, so that if a user knows what he/she is looking for, he/she can get to it more quickly/directly.  I'm thinking it might be nice to create a search that combines these various possible elements, where a user could pre-select 0-5 hierarchies and then still use a search at any point along the path.  I'm struggling to come up with a good visual presentation of that, though, so any advice, especially with a working example, would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

[Viktor Tachev]

Hello Bradley,

Based on the provided description it looks more straight-forward to have a flat list of products. Possibly showing name, price and possibly one or two additional properties of a product. For this you can utilize the Grid component. 

For filtering the data you could add a sidebar with the described cascading dropdowns. In addition there can be a free text input in the sidebar as well and a button to trigger the operation.

When the users click the button use JavaScript to get the values in each dropdown via the client-side value() method. The Kendo TextBox component also has a value method that can be used to retrieve the value.

Once you have that info available you can filter the data in the Grid component. Call the filter() method for the DataSource of the Grid with the respective parameters. This will pass the selected options to the Controller and the relevant items can be returned to the client-side and displayed in the Grid.

 

Regards,
Viktor Tachev
Progress Telerik

[Bradley]

Thank-you very much, Viktor.  This sounds good, but since asking my question the project was cancelled, so I won't be able to confirm whether or not this is a good solution.