Deleting Products - what are the implications?

[Tim_A]

Hi all,

what are the implications of deleting our products and creating new ones?

For instance:

Our 'Business' category has 2 products - 'text listings' and 'photo listings'.

What would happen when it comes to advert renewals/upgrades if we deleted them both, and made a single 'Business Listing' product?

Cheers

Tim

[Eric Barnes]

Very good question. I believe this would cause problems with renewals and if they edit their listings because listings are tied to packages. If it is deleted it wouldn't find the new one.

The good news is in v4.1 I have added a way to make packages hidden but that version isn't officially out yet. In the meantime the only way to do what you describe is to manually edit the db and change the package on those listings to your new one.

[Lhotch]

What if you created your new package, left the old packages in tact but just hid them at the template level until a later time when you know all the existing ads that used those packages would be gone?

[Tim_A]

Hi both, thanks for the replies.

Not exactly ideal though... I wonder how many people have done this without even realising the implications...

If I was to change the packages via the DB (all 832 of them!) would I simply have to change the package name to correspond to the new one, or is there a further edit i'd need to do?

Thanks for any help

Tim

[Tim_A]

okay... looking into it the likely table for changes is _orders

if I change 'oProductID' and 'oProduct'

to the respective product id and product name, is this all I have to change, or are they referenced elsewhere in the database?

Cheers for any answers

Tim

[Eric Barnes]

I think this is the only thing but I am not 100% sure. I would recommend first creating a database backup before trying this to make sure you can revert back in case it doesn't work.

[Bronxgodzilla]

Hi Tim

Very good questions, indeed! Personally I believe the direct db manual update the way to go.

From my preliminary review and playing with the db before I got into 68C I would say those two tables are correct, as Eric (who should know ) states. However the way to be 99.9 percent certain would be to do a search on the calls to/from both Orders tables and see if any other tables could be being updated/incremented/decremented when you delete your products. I am barely familiar with 68C code, but many other db-related languages operate in a similar manner so I cannot see why 68C with its mySQL would be too different. Definately backup the db before doing so. A few simple tests should tell you whether or not you are on the right track.

Good Luck, and please keep asking good questions!

BG

[Tim_A]

Thanks for the replies all.

I duplicated the orders table and ran some SQL queries to re-assign product ids and product names which seemed to work just fine.

I've since ran these queries on the live table (after backing up of course!!) and all seems to work fine, renewals, upgrades, orders all seem to work as normal

Is this something that can be addressed in a more user-friendly way in v4.1 ?

Cheers

Tim