Okay, here is what I did and how the relationship works.
I setup the site up so pages are just pages. 4 of those pages list the products in different ways (manufacture, software, by type, by application). The products themselves are really posts. The page template was setup so it only displays posts where the page name and category match. (there is a category for every sorting method).
What this does is allows me to create one product post which can be sorted based on how the viewer wants to look at it. Site users can approach what their looking for from different angles. (i.e "let me see all TVs" or "Let me see all products from a manufacture". I thought this was quiet ingenious because it allows my customer to maintain their products as posts. My customer is not e-commerce site due to the complexity and cost of the products the sell so I didn't really consider an advanced commerce type of system.
So all said and done the sorting method works wonderful and the only kink in my plan is that loose page context when I viewer want to view the details of the product. I can't build the context from the post because I don't know which page "view" they came in through.
- Is there a carry state (such as what page did I just come from) which I can build logic to rebuild the menu?
- Is there an add-in would be better?
Sorry for the book, but I hope it explains the "use case" for what I did, even if it wasn't the best way of doing something.