Hierarchical Improt Files

[allen]

Hi all,

With hierarchical import files, how do you delete the value of a Custom Property?

If you remove the Custom Property from the product, Actinic leaves the value it as it was.

If you set the value to "", Actinic creates a new entry in the search dialogs for "" (a blank entry - doubly pointless since this entry has the same value as the Any entry).

Thanks in Advance,

Allen

[cdicken]

I'm not a great expert at hierarchical importing - but if I was approaching this, I would remove all the custom properties from the 'ProductProperties' table of the database, and then import just the ones you want from the import file.

Custom Properties all have an ID of '3' in the 'ProductProperties' table in the database.

[allen]

Originally posted by cdicken
I'm not a great expert at hierarchical importing - but if I was approaching this, I would remove all the custom properties from the 'ProductProperties' table of the database, and then import just the ones you want from the import file.

Custom Properties all have an ID of '3' in the 'ProductProperties' table in the database.

So you're saying that, using a hierarchical import file, there is no way to delete custom properties from products?

Small bit of background:
In this case being generated from a csv file by a PHP script I've written - to allow the customer to update their online shop from a spreadsheet, as according to my research using hierarchical import files is the only way to import custom property values into Actinic.

I have a custom property called 'Search'. It's value can be 'New', 'Best Seller' or nothing. If I set it to 'Best Seller' for a particular product in my hierarchical import file, I then can't 'unset' it - The only method I have found so far is to set it to something like " " (space) or "" (no text), which creates ugly looking extra entries on the search form that my clients don't like.

Could this get looked at please? In my opinion, if the value of the Custom Property is "" in the heirarchical import file then it should be removed from the product. Which would make even more sense since if you go to view the custom properties of one of these products, when you click 'OK' you get a warning that Actinic found a Custom Property with an empty value and is going to delete it.

Regards,

Allen

[cdicken]

I'll ask the development team for some more ideas.

[allen]

Originally posted by cdicken
I'll ask the development team for some more ideas.

Thanks

Allen

[Jan]

The only way to remove things using hierarchical import it to use the replace option when you import rather than update. I have for a couple of people written sql to remove items from Actinic that are not longer available in an external source.

Regards,

[cdicken]

The 'replace' option is probably your best bet to remove the empty custom property values.