Big filtering issue - cannot have a product in two or more filtered sections

[graphicz]

Client site will sell headphones.
Main sections are Head, Ear, Add-Ons and Speakers and contain actual products.
'Shop by brand' sections are populated by filtering based on Brand variable.
Other sections are HiFi, Sport, Urban and Wireless and need to be populated with products from the main sections. It is likely that most products will need to appear in at least two other sections - brand and one or two other.
This cannot be done by filtering as one can only filter by one property. Adding a second filtering property row means the product must satisfy BOTH to be included, the rows of properties are additive not 'either/or'.
If these sections are populated with duplicate products, either multiple instances of the same product occur in the sections populated by filtering, OR if indexing product duplicates is switched off, you cannot filter by these products and they just disappear when filtering is performed.
If the brand variable is changed to be editable in product duplicates, one could remove the brand variable which would prevent duplicates, but would stop the duplicate products being filterable by brand which is a requirement.
Can anyone think of a solution, this seems to be a pretty major issue and is preventing my client going live with his site?
A solution would be if we could tell the filtering whether to use rows of filterable properties as alternates rather than as additive. (in BlockIf terms as OR rather than as AND.)

Please can anyone help?

Thank you.

[peblaco]

The sections where you said "This cannot be done by filtering as one can only filter by one property". You can filter by more than one property it depends on the setup.

Where you said "Adding a second filtering property row means the product must satisfy BOTH to be included" from this I assume you are using the Section > Filtering tab > "Where Properties Have Value" > and you are adding multiple properties here as this is the only place where the filtering enforces matching of two or more specific values. That is working as intended.

You may need to set it up like this:
Section "Filtering" tab:
Enable Filtering / Make Filtering the Default View / All Sections.
Where Properties Have Value: Only use one row to return the main page brand or type.
Details of Filter - Use Filter: Your filter name.
Settings menu > Search and Filtering Settings:
Filtering tab > click on your filter name > click the + to add a custom property, repeat to add multiple rows to the filter. These are "alternates" / "OR" properties for the sidebar filter to allow searching by all custom property values.
Apply / Upload. The result is a filtered section matching a specific property but the sidebar contains all custom properties with valid results which allows for alternate / OR / secondary filtering.

If the above is not the case then please explain in more detail which products with which properties you are trying to show.

[graphicz]

The custom variables are, for example, Category1, Category2, Category3, Category4.

A pair of headphones would be Head for Category1, and maybe DJ for Category2 and Urban for Category3.

A headphone case would be AddOns for Category1, and Head for Category2 and DJ for Category3

The aim is for anything with 'Head' in any category to appear in the Head section, for anything with DJ in any category to appear in the DJ section etc.

I followed your suggestion where headphones all had Category1 as Head and a couple of headphone cases had Head as category2.

I made a new filter called 'Specials' (for want of) and the lines are:
Brand - ticked - any
Colour - ticked - any
Category1 - unticked- head
Category2- unticked- head

The upload either did not show the category 2 products or I got a Json error.

Category 1 appeared in the sidebar ticked by default with no products showing.
When unticked the products appeared but none from cartegory2
Plus, we dont want Category1 and Category2 in the side bar.

I do just wonder if the whole filtering thing needed a little more thought and a little more clarity of explanation. There is for example nothing about filtering in the 12.0.0.0 AUG

[graphicz]

To clarify:

Search and filer settings:

Brand - ticked - any
Colour - ticked - any
Category1 - unticked- head
Category2- unticked- head

Yields on upload: The filter operation returned a script error. Please try again, and contact us if the error persists. The error was: [SyntaxError: parseJSON]

Brand - ticked - any
Colour - ticked - any
Category1 - ticked- head
Category2- ticked- head

No products initially, Category 1 ticked and grey. When unticked products appear, but no products from the Category2.

I am going to do it the old fashioned way with blockifs.

[peblaco]

The aim is for anything with 'Head' in any category to appear in the Head section, for anything with DJ in any category to appear in the DJ section etc.

Okay I see so you have the same values in different custom variables. That will make it more difficult to calculate filtering where by default properties look for separate values.

You could set up a filter with defaults and use blockifs or Javascript to hide certain variables in the sidebar. I just tried what you did, selected make filtering the default view, in the Settings menu > Search and Filtering settings > created a new filter with several properties and selected a default value, which you would expect to work because it does actually pre-select the chosen values on the sidebar filtering and oops.. error!

"No matching products were found."
Filtering loading freezes on screen and..
"The filter operation returned a script error. Please try again, and contact us if the error persists. The error was:
[SyntaxError: parseJSON]"

I don't know if you let support know about the syntax error but I did too for an extra vote.

Possible solutions:
1) A Javascript fix needed for the filtering!
2) A custom product list with actinic php block to check for the custom variable "OR" for the values and return the list of products, this could be what you are already doing.
3) Using the search script to search for properties matching results as the search can do AND / OR results and linking via the search string.

[Hugh Gibson]

I would really like to get to the bottom of what's going on here, particularly regarding getting JSON errors when just configuring filtering via the settings.

Have you raised support tickets? That's the best way of getting information through to the development team in a controlled way. Let support know that you want it escalated - either to me, Senthil or Jawahar (you may remember him from the partner day, Jonathan).

We would need snapshots showing the problems, with a clear explanation of what you want to achieve.

Jonathan: being able to show all products that have "Head" in Category1, Category2 etc isn't easy using filtering as we have it set up now. You can reconfigure your variables to have a "Head" variable and set it to "Yes" or similar. Then it's easy to find all those products in a filter.

Regarding the JSON errors: Check the network tab in Chrome Developer Tools (or similar for other browsers) and see what the response was to the filtering AJAX call. That may give a clue to the errors.

You can also turn on search/filter tracing into the online error.err file. This shows details of each stage of the filtering and might give you a clue of what is going on.

Best way to do this is to edit ActinicConstants.pm and look for the line

#?$::DC_LOG_SHORT			= 1;	  # only include essential details in debug log

Remove the #?.

Further down, there are three lines:

#?$::DEBUG_CLASS_FILTER |= 	$::DC_ORDERSCRIPT | # log only if we are in debug mode
#?							$::DC_CART_RESTORE |
#?							$::DC_SEARCH;

Remove the #? from these three lines.

Upload and go to your filtering page. Check the error.err file and you will find a lot of details of the steps taken by the filtering. You may find information that helps you work out what is going on.

[peblaco]

From the quick test that I did I was getting no matching products found despite the filters being correctly pre-selected in the sidebar.

Plus with the syntax error the actinicsearch.js (line 1392) reporting Network Error: 404 Not Found - AjaxProductList_14_1.json.

I tried web > refresh to re-upload but it was still reporting missing json file. I have reported it to support.

[graphicz]

My solution!

Thanks for your input Hugh
Yes, support are involved and are very supportive.

My solution which seems to work is this:

Rather than create category variables, create variables with the same names as each section of the site. Type is list of choices, create two choices 'yes' and 'no'. Place of setting, section and product, initial value use parent, top level value 'no'. (I tried it with true/false and it doesn't work when the property is an integer, it does work when the property is text, hence list of choices.

Simply select yes for each section you wish the product in question to appear in. In sections with original products the products will get their value by 'use parent'.

For each section Tick bothe filtering boxes (Enable and Default), Section Any section, add a property row and select the variable appropriate to te section and define the value as yes.

I did find I had to click on store top, go back and forth to design, close with a snapshot, reopen and refresh twice for the settings to take but take they did.

I realise that with a lot of sections this could e a daunting task, but I guess the variables could be created in an exported and reimported excel file.

[graphicz]

Another big filtering isue-random replacing of filtering property value by Selerdeck

While I have Hugh's attention this is a major problem. Sellerdeck randomly replaces the value of the filtering property with the last value available.

For weeks we have had the shop by brands sections populated by filtering. There are 26 sections/brands set up as Enable filtering/default view where property is Google Brand value is text of the Brand name, the last one being Zumreed.
Either I will send a perfectly correct and working snapshot to the client and he will open it and all the brand sections are filtered by Zumreed, or, after he has corrected all 26 he will snapshot, close and switch off and when he goes to it again the next day all the sections are filtering by Zumreed.

I have just implemented the above solution with the variable options for all the other sections selectable with the text yes or no. 'No' is last in the list (of two.)

I sent the tested and working snapshot to the client and he tells me it is hopeless, takes a snapshot of his version and sends it back. Sure enough, all the non brand sections filterable by Head, Ear etc etc have changed to 'no' and all the brands to Zumreed.

Please can this major issue be addressed? Support suggested using dropdowns for the brands but my yes/no is a text dropdown and Sellerdeck is still changing all the filtering to either 'no' or 'Zumreed'
******
Just corrected everything, took a snapshot and imported snapshot into another PC. One of the brands had just disappeared from the list of choices despite being entered correctly at product level. I had to delete and re-enter to get it to appear again as a choice for Property value.

[Hugh Gibson]

Have you raised a support ticket Jonathan? We need a snapshot to reproduce the behaviour.

[graphicz]

Snapshot sent yesterday via 'send files' in the services tab marked attn. MF GF and HG.

I have imported the snapshot into different PCs and am able to reproduce the issue. I think that doing two snapshot imports one after the other might help, I also suspect that automatically compacting the database on shutdown has something to do with it.

I have looked a through the actinic.mdb to try and find where the values for the section filtering properties reside. The theory is that one could quickly paste in the correct settings each time this occurred but I cannot find them in any table yet.

Can you help with that?

Thank you

You have successfully uploaded your file, and a notification has been sent to the following recipients:
SellerDeck support
The files sent were as follows:
MTYE-Graphicz_050913_1541.acd

[Hugh Gibson]

Ian's raised an internal support ticket - ref SUP-3091 - but he couldn't find an external support incident. I suggest you raise one so we can properly manage this.

I've taken a look at your snapshot. I've tried various combinations of closing, compacting, snapshotting etc with debug and a release build and I can't trigger the fault.

The information is stored in the ProductProperties table with nType = 1. nValue4 is the section ID in which they appear, sString2 is the selected value that you see changing to the last value. nParentPropertyID is the nID of the Variable table.

Have you seen this problem yourself, or it is only your client? If it's only the client, that suggests some problem with their system.

Has anyone else seen a problem like this?

[graphicz]

As I said above, I have been able to reproduce the issue.
Importing snapshot onto a new machine.
Switching off then on again.
Tested on four PCs
In Support ticket 56518 Joe said: I do agree the software should not reset/replace the choices for the filter.

[graphicz]

Further testing, issue reproduced where four or five of the brand sections changed to UDG after snapshot import. Importing the snapshot again some of these sections resolved, others and some new ones changed to 'thinksound'.

If you are saying this is a system issue what should I be looking for in the system to account for the phenomenon?

Clients PC is W8. My W8 PC does not reproduce, my W7 PC and XP PC have both reproduced the issue.
*****
OK This gets more interesting.

In Product Properties, section ID 49 shows the value to be Slappa, but in the software the vale is thinksound. , section ID 54 shows the value to be Gear4, but in the software the vale is thinksound, and there are 12 further instances in the Brand sections where the aplication says the value is thinksound, but the database says the value is the correct expected one. When the site is uploaded, the values in the application are the ones that apply, not the ones in the database.

[Duncan Rounding]

...
Clients PC is W8. My W8 PC does not reproduce, my W7 PC and XP PC have both reproduced the issue.

I wonder why it doesn't happen on all systems. You say it didn't happen with your own Windows 8 PC?