I'm actually very surprised to see the lack of collaberation in regards to the search features of viart.
 
with the ability to have so many features, the search with viart is minimal.
 
I'm not understanding why they've yet to include an "additional fields" option like oscommerce, that would also be searchable.
 
For example. Viart allows you to create downloadable products. But if it's music, how do you really search for a song, or even how do you search for an artist or even a record lable.
 
Epanded fields fucntionality with "search" capability to go along with searching the extra fields.
 
Someone could go and say search for a particular artist with a particular song, or something...

Hello,
 
You can use ViArt Advanced Search functionality for this purpose.
Please, go to Admin > Products > Advanced Search and make appropriate settings for the advanced search that will be used by your users on your site. The 'Advanced search' link can be found right below the Products Search field on your site.
 
With regards,
ViArt Support Team

Well, actually, here is what I'm saying:
 
You cannot search just subcategories. It's really limited. The Viart system really needs the ability to be able to add on additional fields and also be able to search off of them. For instance, your advanced search settings page, has like 6 boxes for options to allow searches onto the site. How about if we want to create extra fields on the product pages... we cannot do that. for instance:
 
I am opening up a music site. I want to be able to put the artist, label, and title, on the site. However, this is not an available option. Also, I'd then like to be able to have customers be able to search off of it, and then be able to narrow a search down. Also, there should be the ability to do sub-category searches. I think this makes sense.
 
Thanks...

Hello,
 
When you add a new option to any product it appears in the ' Search in the products options' list ( admin > products > Advanced Search > Search in the products options)
So you can add such options to your products as artist, label, and title and these options will appear in the
' Search in the products options' list.
 
With regards,
ViArt Support Team
 

At first I didn't think using options was the way to go as options are normally a user selectable 'thing'. For example customers could select the size they want from a drop down box. As Natalia has said you can then elect to have the option 'size' searchable via the advanced search facility.
 
There are many times though when you want to set up search criteria that are not customer selectable options in terms checking out a product. This is why those with an osCommerce background (as I have) think in terms of the 'Extra Fields' contribution.
 
Here is an example of what I mean: I am putting together a Vitamins site for a client. The client wants the customer to be able to search on 'Health Condition' and return all the product matches for that condition.
 
I finally realised that I was able to achieve this by setting the [Option Control] to 'Label' and entering a string of health conditions (to follow my example) in the [Option text] field. So you end up with something like:
 
Option Name: Health Condition
Option Control: Label
Option text: Ingrown toe nails, warts, acne etc
 
Now the customer can do an Advanced Search on 'Health Condition' but when the product page is viewed the health conditions are not use selectable options, but rather are simply printed out as a list for information. e.g.
 
Health Condition: Ingrown toe nails, warts, acne etc