Hi Jerry,
Here is one approach you could try. First have a Category section where you can have your hierarchical structure however you would like to set it up. Then have a multi record section for products. All products get stored here and each product gets a category from the category menu. This way everything is getting stored in the same place.
Then for "suggested items", in an individual product record you could have a multi select drop down showing other product categories, so you can select 1 or more categories that you would want to suggest products from. This way you're suggesting categories and you won't run into issues if products are renamed or removed.
Finally on the viewer page, you can select a given number of suggested items that belong to one of the categories that were suggested. What you're actually doing is selecting say 5 products that have a category that was listed in the "suggested items" list. You can order this however you want. You can also use a random ordering so it's different each time.
Hope this helps get you started.
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Jason Sauchuk - Project Manager
interactivetools.com
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