Single point of reference for choice pricing?

[Mintec]

Hi,
I am new to Actinic so this might be simple but I cannot find it by searching.

Having started by using a standard theme and creating a product, I have then added a component ‘Gift Wrapping’ with an attribute ‘choice of wrapping’ and three choices which are priced separately. This is working O.K.

My question is; as I am planning to offer this for each of my products (currently by copy and paste to include the components) is there a way to have a single reference for the price and description for each choice? If not then to alter a description from say Christmas to Valentines gift wrapping I would have to alter all products individually. Similarly the same would apply to make a price change.
Thanks
Colin.

[Bruce]

Colin,

The easiest way to make global changes would be to export a hierarchical file 'File | Export | Catalog' and then run a find and replace on what you want to change. You can then import the saved file back into Actinic to update. The other way would be to use the long approach and do it one at a time.

Kind regards,

[Mintec]

Thanks for your reply.

I have now tried it using the Excel spreadsheet but when it was re-imported there were lots of errors. I presume that Excel was changing the format somehow or I had selected the wrong format. I then realised that as it was a text file I could use notepad, and it has worked fine. The other thing that became apparent was that keeping the ‘Choice Name’ and the ‘HTML for Name’ the same would have made life easier for find and replace.

Regards
Colin

[completerookie]

Excel happily opens up CSV type files, but when it saves them, the trailing empty fields are dropped - this then causes the actinic system to think that "it expected 87 but only got 53" or something like that.

notepad, on the other hand, just simply saves whatever is there and so it continues to work.

What we need is for actinic to change the import utility to automatically add the extra missing fields as "" (nothing) and then try to import the line - if it imports the line seccessfully, great, else generate an error. - seems to be the best and easiest fix

I've been told that the easist workaround is to add a "spare" customvar to the end of the product and then set that to 1 (or something) - then on import, just throw it away.

This is almost a bug, but definately one for the wishlist