Opening New Product Listings causes Actinic to Crash

[peter]

Hi

When I select Marketing > New Product Listings from the menu Actinic crashes - immediately closes down.

The other items on the Marketing menu appear to work normally.

Any suggestions to help me....

Thanks
Pete

[leehack]

Have you got products in the list that have recently been deleted from the site? If so then this has been touched on before (by Gabe and/or bumpsy i believe), i think the fix was to go into the database to remove the items from the list(s). As i understand, actinic doesn't remove the products from the marketing lists when they are deleted from the catalog, but it then throws a wobbler when you delete products that are still within the lists.

[TraceyHand]

it happened to me and yes, the solution was to remove the "deleted" items in the database

[george]

Been there done that. A wee warning would be nice though, rather then just halting the building of Rome altogether.

[TraceyHand]

something along the lines of

"Warning. Deleting this item from your catalogue will cause your marketting lists to go tits up and force you into the depths of somewhere you really shouldn't be fiddling in"

Is that what you had in mind, G?

[tonyd]

I've had the same problem twice, first with Best sellers, now with Related products. The only fix seems to be to open the database in Access and delete the offending items. The trouble is my customer is 20 miles away and sending them an updated snapshot doesn't seem to fix their database - which means talking them through it on the phone, or a 40 mile round trip to fix Actinics bugs. Luckily they have Access on their PC or we wouldn't have a fix at all.

Plus the customer is not happy with being supplied buggy software, and who can blame them - it's ridiculous that removing or renaming a product can cause the software to stop working.

Better be a proper fix soon.

[peter]

Thanks all

I shall give that a go. I echo

Better be a proper fix soon.

Thanks all for your prompt help.

[gabrielcrowe]

i'd like you to give this a test.

just some code i bundled together.

make a COPY of your actiniccatalog.mdb file somewhere acessible.

'my shop database is located at:
mydb = "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Actinic v8\Sites\site1\ActinicCatalog.mdb"

	Set OBJdbConnection = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
	OBJdbConnection.Open "DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)}; DBQ=" & mydb
	SQLQuery = "DELETE FROM [NewProducts] WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM [Product] WHERE [NewProducts].[sProductRef]=[Product].[Product reference] AND [Product].status LIKE 'Y')"
	Set Result = OBJdbConnection.Execute(SQLQuery)
	OBJdbConnection.Close	
	
msgbox("done")

what this code basically does (after you put in your own db path that is) is compare the products table and the new products table and deletes the offending items if they dont exist.

needs modification, since i'm guessing, becasue I really dont ahve this problem, guve me steps to reproduce and i'll get a better fix for you.

DONT unleash this on your production shop unless you are sure it worked

edit: more aggressive: deletes if the item has been deleted and not purged yet, it still removes it.

[gabrielcrowe]

bwt, its vbscript.

make a textfile called 'fix_new_products.vbs'

put this stuff in it.

[gabrielcrowe]

this one simply empies the table:

	SQLQuery = "EMPTY TABLE [NewProducts]"

[gabrielcrowe]

fix marketing lists crash new products, best sellers and also bought

'my shop database is located at:
mydb = "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Actinic v8\Sites\actinet\ActinicCatalog.mdb"

Function DoDatabaseThings(SQLQuery)
	'New Products
	Set OBJdbConnection = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
	OBJdbConnection.Open "DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)}; DBQ=" & mydb
	Set Result = OBJdbConnection.Execute(SQLQuery)
	OBJdbConnection.Close
End Function

DoDatabaseThings("DELETE FROM [NewProducts] WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM [Product] WHERE [NewProducts].[sProductRef]=[Product].[Product reference] AND [Product].status LIKE 'Y')")
DoDatabaseThings("DELETE FROM [BestSellers] WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM [Product] WHERE [BestSellers].[sProductRef]=[Product].[Product reference] AND [Product].status LIKE 'Y')")
DoDatabaseThings("DELETE FROM [AlsoBought] WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM [Product] WHERE [AlsoBought].[sProductRef]=[Product].[Product reference] AND [Product].status LIKE 'Y')")
DoDatabaseThings("DELETE FROM [RelatedProducts] WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM [Product] WHERE [RelatedProducts].[sProductRef]=[Product].[Product reference] AND [Product].status LIKE 'Y')")
	
msgbox("Done! pesky marketing items cleaned!")

does the whole lot, all marketing screwups fixed.

does this work for anyone? or does it just break the catalog?

[fergusw]

It didn't break anything for me.
I recreated the bug - Actinic was crashing upon entering the Best sellers - ran the VBScript - Robert's my mother's brother! I can go into Best sellers again.

Note - only tested on default Actinic site so far.....

[gabrielcrowe]

did it only remove the broken items? and more to the point, how do i go about creating this problem?

[george]

Gabriel, slightly off topic but given your recent splurge of tweaks scattered around the forum have a look at this one.

Is it possible to exclude `out of stock` items from being used in the Best Sellers/New Products lists?

There is something that I've done before that hides them from the list BUT leaves a space where they should be, resulting in a very odd list.

Maybe the formulae for calculating the lists needs altered so it can exclude oos items if desired?

[TraceyHand]

and more to the point, how do i go about creating this problem?

that bit's easy! even I can answer that lol

put a product in your best sellers list
then delete the product from your catalogue and try opening your best sellers list again from the marketting menu

It'll crash Actinic

Only way back into the marketting menus without crashing will be to delete the product from best sellers in the database.

does that help?