Deleting Multiple Products for Hundreds of Sections

[raspinall]

Hi,

In our catalog we have got around 18,000 products. Around 90% of these products are imported into actinic from a CSV file supplied from our supplier. The CSV file is manipulated in excel to get it into the correct format for importing into Actinic as a flat file import. We receive a new CSV file four times a year with the current stock profile that we can offer for sale.

If I simply manipulate this new CSV file to the correct format and import into actinic I create a problem, if an item is discontinued, and so it is subsequently is not listed in the new CSV file, when I do an import I am left with the discontinued items still in catalog and I have got no way of finding which products they are to delete them manually.

If when importing the items I select replace instead of update I lose the 1800 or so products that are not in this particular supplier’s inventory, and also possibly run the risk of re-naming the page html files as noted below.

If I simply delete all of the catalogue products and sections from this supplier; when I do a file import all of the page html file names have changed because of the way actinic numbers them rather than just using the section text. This causes problems with people arriving from search results pages in google etc… and we do lose a lot of sales which take months to build back up again, I have made this mistake before!

Is there a simple way to delete all products in a catalog, but leave the sections intact, and then run the import routine to re-populate the empty sections with the new products? At least this way all I would need to do is look for empty sections in the catalog and hide them on the website.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Sorry if this explanation is too long winded, I am still not sure if I have explained my self correctly

Richard Aspinall
www.handytools.co.uk

[NormanRouxel]

A couple of suggestions.

1) Risky: Open ActinicCatalog.mdb in Access (when Actinic isn't running) and look in the Product table. Field Status is "N" for normal products and "D" for deleted ones. You could set them all to "D" and see what happens. I'm not sure what happens to and Attributes / Choices, etc that are linked to these products (they seem to be cleared out if you Purge Content). Test on a spare system, not the live one.

2) Safer: Another route would be to export a Hierarchical file and delete all lines (after the Header bits) that don't begin with "Section,....". You now have a hierarchical file that would recreate your Site structure but with no products. It would leave Brochure pages intact. You could now delete all Products and Sections and then recreate them as empty by importing this file.

If you've some way of identifying the 1800 other products, you could keep them in their own hierarchical file. One way to manage this would be to put them on a spare system (with identical site structure) and export them from there.

[raspinall]

Access Version

Thanks for that Norman, I have been looking at your Access solution and it is looking good so far.

There is just a database version issue that someone may be able to help me with.

My ActinicCatalog.mdb database version is Access 95. So I need convert it to 2002 - 2003 format to allow me to build the query that I need in order to delete the products that need removing.

With these products deleted I then went to convert back to Access 95, and I found that this was not an option. So I tried converting to Access 97 format to see if this would work with Actinic.

Actinic seems to be happy with the 97 format, it starts OK all the products are as they should be i.e. my 1800 in house products are still in stock and the rest are deleted. Actinic also compacts the 97 format database OK from the housekeeping menu.

But I am concerned that something may come back to haunt me later if I go whith the 97 version and try running a live catalog with an Access 97 database.

Does anyone know which versions of Access Actinic will work with?

[NormanRouxel]

Confused. You are posting in the V9 forum and V9 doesn't use an ancient version of Access. All mine are 2000.

[Duncan Rounding]

Updating the Access file should not cause you any problems but as ever always keep multiple database backups before and during working in the database.

[raspinall]

Actinic is V 9.0.3.0.0.0.IMMA

But we have constantly upgraded over the years from V3

I have just checked some archived backup database files and they are all defiantly Access 95

What is the latest version that I should try converting to?

[leehack]

and they are all defiantly Access 95

Put them on the naughty step, 1 minute for each year old.

[Duncan Rounding]

My v7 thru 9 sites are Access 2000 format. (as reported by Access 2003)

[NormanRouxel]

Go to Access 2000 - that's what current Actinic uses.