More issues with filters

A big store needs a good search module, and I am still having lots of problems. The filter module allows me to select multiple filters. But then they display as a series of individual fields. Which is very clumsy and takes up a lot of space. And is unacceptable to the client for those reasons. How do I set the module to display the filters as a simple clickable dropdown menu of the type we typically see on all large e-commerce sites? Also, I could not find a filter for "search by price range." Or a filter for "sort by price - lowest to highest." Again, these are very common abilities for an e-commerce site. And I am still not finding a way to do it Hikashop. Can I make my own filters? Or am I stuck with the default filters that come with the installation package?
Thanks again,
-Jim Gribble

I installed a filter to view products by price range. I set it to pull from a category called "Books and Monographs." Instead, it shows results from all categories and all products, including the ones that I want to exclude. Some products need to be excluded from search because they are not for sale directly through the store. The user must complete a registration form first. The price range function also does not work. Many products displayed on click are far outside the selected price range. The filter produces completely RANDOM results. The documentation for this is very sketchy. So I would appreciate some help.
I installed a filter to search by product description. I also set this to pull from the category "Books and Monographs" Instead it shows all products and categories, at random. I see no correlation between the keywords I type in and the search results that come up. Because there's no detailed instructions on how to set up filters, I wondered if I could get some help.
Only one of the three filters is working - and not very well. This is the "search product titles" filter. If I type in more than one word, it generates crazy scrambled results.
Thank you again, and I hope to hear from you. I would be happy to give you temporary back-end access to correct whatever I did wrong, if I did indeed make a mistake. Perhaps then I can look at the settings to see how this is supposed to work.
-Jim Gribble

I seem to have fixed the other issues via the default Hikashop product display menu (571). There I set the category to my desired one: "Books and Monographs." But the select by price filter still produces random results. Also, the module will not allow me to display another filter I created to sort products in either ascending or descending alphabetical order. Why is that? How do I display a sort filter via the module? It seems not to be possible.
Thanks again,
-Jim Gribble

Thanks. I got all this. It wasn't the problem. This is what happened(s). I did not want my filters to search all products. Only the major high-volume products in a category called "Books and Monographs." I had decided to use the filter module because it's a more flexible display system. At first I tried to set the search category ("Books and Monographs") in the filter parameters. I found out the hard way that this works ONLY if you are displaying your filters by means of a menu item(s). That way the filters automatically appear at the top of all pages on click. But, if you are going to use the filter module, NO CATEGORY can be selected in the filter parameters. One might logically think that you should be able to select your search category in the module parameters. Not true. It is a good deal more complicated than that. You can only select which filters you want the module to show. To select a search category, you need to go to the default Hikashop product listing menu item to which the module is hooked up. The component installs this as menu ID 291. The module is hooked up to it by default during component installation. Only there, in the Hikashop menu options, can you select a search category for use by the module. And everything will work fine. As long as you DID NOT toggle any of your filters to select a search category. Relative to category selection, if the filter and the module are in conflict, I assure you that Hikashop absolutely will/does generate random-crazy results. Certainly this system does work well once you figure it out. But it also to me seems over-complicated and counter-intuitive. I had to puzzle it out by myself without any help from the documentation.
Please confirm for others that my above understanding is correct. So that people will fully understand all the steps to create filters for the module and then select a search category. This is going to be a very common need for clients who do not want their search results cluttered up with junk that they hardly ever sell. Shoppers will still have a way to find that seldom-sought junk, but the client doesn't want it to pop up constantly in product searches. Instead the client wants the search results to pull up high-volume, high-margin products which are in high demand. That was exactly my challenge in configuring the filters for this new site.
-Jim Gribble

Hi,
I have one last (I hope) question about filters. It is really more about using menu items. There are a lot of product ordering options including one called price_percentage. I already have a click that alphabetically orders by name all products in the category "Books and Monographs." The client wants another click which will order by ascending price all products in "Books and Monographs." I tried toggling the menu ordering to "price_percentage" but that produced random results. How do you configure a menu item to order category products by price? This too is a very common need for clients with large e-stores and multiple product categories. It must be possible in Hikashop and I'm just not seeing it in the controls or the documentation.
Thanks again,
-Jim Gribble

I have noted that in the products control panel you can click on all the sort options except "price." The rest - sort by name, code, quantity and published - all work. Could something have gone amiss with the component when I installed it? It's curious to me that the filter "sort by price" still does work.
-Jim Gribble