duplicates and my brain: disaster

[gabrielcrowe]

personally, we dont use duplicates in our shops. there are all sorts of horror stories surrounding them.

but what is the actual beef with these clever little buggers?

i have had a poke through the documentation, and even as an avid user of actinic, all the information on the problems elude me.

are they actually broken, and what is the basic breakdown of their problems?

and i'm right in saying that a duplicate is essentially a new product with the price linked to an original product? and, is only the price shared or are there other effects of the original shared.

i ask this from a development viewpoint as well as a user viewpoint, since i'm trying to get duplicates working well in actinet as well. i dont want it to cause problems for those people who have duplicates.

blimey, that does sound like a noob question, doesnt it?

[leehack]

noob....RTFM

[TraceyHand]

blimey, that does sound like a noob question, doesnt it?

The can inherit as many "characteristics" from the original as you want them to (see Settings > Duplicate Field Configuration ) although changes in here are site-wide changes

As far as being broken...well, not really. On upgrade, they certainly cause some problems but I use duplicates quite a lot in BB and they all work ok.

That said, in the Jesters store we do have a problem with shipping being a bit glitchy on duplicates when items are first added to the cart (fixes itself once added and "viewed" though)

I think the majority of duplicate problems are on upgraded stores but I believe they are fixable by deleting and recreating. I could be wrong though.

I'm sure you'll get a whole host of other opinions too lol

[leehack]

SETTINGS | DUPLICATE FIELD CONFIGURATION

sets what they do, but essentially i would say your presumption is correct. It can be a product in its own right or linked fully through to the original. The original is the product added to the cart though when purchased.

[TraceyHand]

noob....RTFM

LOL

*makes note to avoid Lee this morning*

[leehack]

LOL, not at all, just giving him some stick.

[gabrielcrowe]

and rightly so.

if one wants to truly pwn, one must pwn in all games

[leehack]

pawnage is my fave term

we noticed...

[fergusw]

Hi Gabe,

In the [products] database table duplicate products differ in 4 fields. Other than these they are essentially the same as an ordinary product.

Differences:
[Product referece]: prefixed with (n)! followed by orig Prod ref (but you knew this! )
[nProductType]: set to 1 for duplicates , 0 for orig
[sOriginalProdRef]: as it says on the tin
[nDuplicateIndex]: -1 for originals and 1,2,3 etc for each consecutive duplicate

There is a separate table [DuplicatedFields] which manages which fields are modifiable in the duplicate.
This functionality is goverened, to my knowlegde, by the Actinic program via the GUI.
i.e. when editing/adjusting values the GUI tries to run the checks against the original products based on the settings in the [DiplicatedFields] table.

[george]

Why is there nothing to tell you that a product has a duplicate?

This makes me angry actually.

[TraceyHand]

Why is there nothing to tell you that a product has a duplicate?

This makes me angry actually.

*makes additional note to stay out of G's way this morning*

[fergusw]

Why is there nothing to tell you that a product has a duplicate?

This makes me angry actually.

*gets Gabe's attention and points to this thread*

[gabrielcrowe]

Why is there nothing to tell you that a product has a duplicate?

this is this mornings actinet feature. clicking on a product that has duplicates, will also yeild a list of its duplicates, that you can navigate to and edit.

i also want to make sure that i'm not breaking anything that actinic itself puts in place.

and mr hack?

pawnage, is the act of exchanging goods for money.

pwnage, is the act of owning noobs.

grumpster.

[leehack]

this is this mornings actinet feature. clicking on a product that has duplicates, will also yeild a list of its duplicates, that you can navigate to and edit.

Now that would be nice.

Does the amount of o's in noob count for anything?

[george]

I mean, I know what has duplicates, but how is anyone else supposed to know? As someone suggested before, search for the product reference number every single time? Gimme a break, it should be there in front of you.

I also think that the product description does not always update in the duplicates (when altering the master product), and clicking the `reset duplicates` button. Can't be *rsed to check though, but it happened to us again a couple of days ago.