Exporting Actinic Data

[GiganticDays]

Sorry if this has been posted before; I did a search but couldn't find this specific question.
Is it possible to export portions Actinic data to a flat or heirarchical file? I'm using Catalogue V.7.
The reason I ask is that a large portion of the products on my site come from a data feed from a single supplier which is updated daily. This works fine but, as products are dropped by our supplier, importing the updated data feed doesn't remove them from Actinic. Over time this results in a large number of products we cannot supply, so I would like to be able to export the items which are not from this supplier, clear the catalogue contents, import the latest data feed then re-import the stuff I exported making my site up to date.
If anyone can think of an alternative method that would be great too.
Thanks in advance.

[NVL]

You could set the import flat file to "can be ordered online" as a "nope" when a product is dropped, at import this would make that product unavailable then manually delete any grey product files from time to time...

[GiganticDays]

Problem is I don't get any info on dropped products; just the complete data feed each day (it's over 6000 items so it's a lot to wade through comparing with the previous day's feed).

[Bruce]

Hi,

You can export Actinic to a hierarchical file but not in bits, if for example you delete a section it will be marked under 'IsDeleted' for the section with a value of '1', the same will apply for the products, valid sections / products will be marked '0'. If you can make the changes in a Hierarchical file and then import it back in, you will be able to delete the products and then run a Purge Content from Housekeeping | Purge ( This will delete all products / sections etc marked for deletion) .

Kind regards,

[Jan]

What format is your external feed in, if it is a format that can be linked to from Access, you could link to it and write a SQL query to look for products that are not in the feed anymore - keep a previous version to allow you to do this and link to both of them, then use the results from that SQL query to mark these items as deleted in Actinic.

If all of that is just goobledegook, then we could write a query for you for a small charge, and possibly wrap it up in a program so that all you have to do is click a button to delete the items that are not longer around.

Regards,

[GiganticDays]

The feed is a csv file so I guess that would be possible, unfortunately your second point is well made; it did sound like gobbledegook. I'm willing to learn however so I will do some investigation. Thanks for your help.

[Jan]

To write the SQL you can use the access query builder and you would need to use an outer join to find the missing entries (access uses words along the lines of include all rows from table x and rows from table y where xxx matches).

Regards,

[andyh]

Hello Graeme,

Not sure if you are still looking into this, but, in the database, can you identify the products from this supplier?

E.g. do the product codes begin with a unique pre-fix for this supplier?

Andy