Hi, I have a products catalog page and am building the pages based on query strings. I need to build a tree of product collections. However, I have encountered some extremely strange behavior with the merchello product collections parent/child relationships.

the following is from an example sidebar I have on the catalog page where I am trying to build collection filters:

@using Merchello.Web
@using Merchello.Web.Models
@using Merchello.FastTrack.Ui


@{
    // get the published catalog content node
    IPublishedContent catalog = ExampleUiHelper.Content.GetCatalog();

    // get the merchello collection selected in the merchello collection picker
    IProductCollection collection = catalog.GetPropertyValue<IProductCollection>("categories");

    // get the children of the catalog's collection
    IEnumerable<IProductCollection> children = collection.Children();

    //the name of the catalog collection (green text)
    <div style="color: green;">@collection.Name</div>

    // get the name of all child collections of the catalog collection (red text)
    foreach (var child in children)
    {
        <ul class="list-unstyled">
            <li style="text-indent: 5%;"><a style="color:red" href="[email protected]">@child.Name</a></li>

            @*get the name of all grandchildren of catalog collection (blue text)*@
            @foreach (var grandchild in child.Children())
            {
                <li style="text-indent: 10%;"><a style="color: blue" href="[email protected]">@grandchild.Name</a></li>
            }
        </ul>
    }
}

Here is what I get as a result of this code (note how the children of the children are actually the children of the root).

What's even crazier to me, is that when I click one of these links, the child collections change to become the grandchildren! For example, here, I clicked on the Red "Necklaces" anchor and got the following back:

note that the catalog collection name has not changed, but somehow now the page thinks it's grandchildren are it's children. I am very confused.

I am building the page by route hijacking. Here is my controller for this:

    public class ftCatalogController : BaseSurfaceController
    {
        public override ActionResult Index(RenderModel renderModel)
        {
            //try to get a merchello product collection from the query string
            try
            {
                var collectionKey = new Guid(Request.QueryString["collection"]);
                var merchello = new MerchelloHelper();
                var collection = merchello.Collections.Product.GetByKey(collectionKey);

                return base.Index(new ftCatalogModel(renderModel.Content)
                {
                    CurrentCollection = collection,
                });
            }
            //if query string invalid, default to the collection in the categories property  of the doctype
            catch(System.Exception e)
            {
                IProductCollection collection = renderModel.Content.GetPropertyValue<IProductCollection>("categories");

                return base.Index(new ftCatalogModel(renderModel.Content)
                {
                    CurrentCollection = collection,
                });
            }
        }
    }

    public class ftCatalogModel : RenderModel
    {
        public ftCatalogModel(IPublishedContent content) : base(content){ }

        public IProductCollection CurrentCollection { get; set; }
    }