Adding New Choice to Every Instance of an Attribute

[SusanF]

Is there any way to add an extra Choice to every instance of a particular Attribute without manually going through every product?

I want to add a 'Happy Mother's Day' choice to the greetings attribute available for each card on my website and it will take hours to go through each product - and then I'll have to take it all off again in a few weeks time

I just wondered if there was another way.

[Duncan Rounding]

I don't think so, but you could export your products to a hierarchial file and then search and replace an existing attribute, then re-import. Just make sure you keep good backups of your export and database first.

[SusanF]

That is kind of along the lines I was thinking I might need to go. I wondered if maybe there was some way of updating the Access database directly to achieve this, but so far haven't been able to discover how?

[Duncan Rounding]

In Access, table ProductProperties, field sString1 contains the attibutes per product - you could search and replace there.

[NormanRouxel]

I wouldn't try this. You want a add a new property, not change the info in an existing one.

You'd have to Insert new records (only for certain products - or only products with a certain Attribute) and keep most of the 22 fields in ProductProperties accurately updated; some with new sequential numbers that depend on prior records and the overall record count.

You can use Copy / Paste in Actinic to quickly add a new Choice to existing records. The Choice will remain in the clipboard so it's easy to move on to the next product and paste the Choice in there too.

[SusanF]

Hi Duncan,

I was originally hoping to add a new choice, but that looks too complicated, so I've used your idea to find and replace on an existing attribute choice.

It's half working. The Choice Name field has been changed okay, but not the HTML For Name field (which is what the customer sees on screen for the choices). This seems to be Sstring3 on the ProductProperties table and I have updated this as well as Sstring1. When I go into Actinic, the Choice Name has been changed, but not the HTML for Name field. Any ideas?

[SusanF]

Hi Norman,

Just read your reply and I agree about adding new choices - too complex and so easy to make a bad mistake here. I would still like to be able to change a choice instead though as this is something that could be useful throughout the year and a lot quicker than using cut and paste every time. Do you think it's possible re my last post?

[NormanRouxel]

Lets say you had a choice "Happy Fathers Day", then it would not be hard to use Access do a simple search / replace on the sString1 for "Happy Fathers Day" and replace it with "Happy Mothers Day". You'd be best doing this only on records where nType is 7. You'd also have to repeat the process for the sString3 field (one is the Choice Name and the other the HTML for Name).

As always, backup everything (especially ActinicCatalog.mdb) before trying anything.

Once you had such a seasonal choice you could always mass replace it as appropriate when the next event come round.

[SusanF]

This is exactly what I have done so far. I've changed every instance of 'Best Wishes' to 'Happy Mother's Day' in both Sstring1 and Sstring3 using Find and Replace. However, when I go into Actinic the name has been changed in the Choice Name, but not the Choice Name HTML field which still says 'Best Wishes' - which means the customer doesn't see the change. It's as if Actinic needs some kind of refresh to make it update this part, but I haven't been able to find a way to do this.

Don't worry about me messing up the site, I'm trying this all out on a test site, not the live. I don't think I could take the stress otherwise! One of the benefits of having Developer instead of Business, I guess.

Thanks for the help.

[NormanRouxel]

Try closing and restarting Actinic after making the changes in Access. It's likely that some data is cached. That worked for me.

[SusanF]

It worked! Thank you both very much. Now to try it out on the real thing - fingers crossed.