User interface configuration

This document describes available configuration options for the user interface, with the purpose of enhancing performance and improving the user experience.

UI optimization for large categories

It is recommended to model the catalog using category hierarchies to avoid having too many items in the same category.
With too many items in a category, it is hard for the user to find an item using the catalog UI components. In
addition, the catalog UI may become slow, and handling the items consumes a large amount of system resources, 
both server side and client side.

If a category contains more than a certain number of items, default 2000, a simplified UI mode is used, disabling
certain features to try to stay responsive. Sorting is disabled as well as the grouping of variations into their
parent products and bundling/packaging of items into a bundle/package.

When simplified UI mode is used, a message appears in the catalog listing "This category listing contains too many items. Some
features have been disabled to improve performance."

The threshold for using the simplified mode can be configured using the SimplifiedCatalogListingThreshold appSetting:

<appSettings>
  <add key="SimplifiedCatalogListingThreshold" value="1000" />
</appSettings>

Last updated: Dec 01, 2014