External linking and product duplicates

[nickcoleman]

The duplicate product feature has been really useful for us and we have now made extensive use of it. The next step was to link to an external Access database, which works fine for the master copies but the duplicated products are not recognised as present in the external data. We want 1 product in the external database to appear many times within Actinic as duplicates. Has anyone found a way round this?

Many thanks
Nick

[Jan]

There seems to be an issue with duplicated products, in that the details between duplications are not kept up to date.

I have just created a new duplicated product and changed the title and description in the second one and the first one did not change.

I then changed the title and description in the first one and the second one did not update.

I can see that you might choose to unlink this information but by default it should be linked - the name, description and price fields are in my experience the fields that are most likely to be linked. You (ie. Actinic) could have a little checkbox to 'unlink' certain fields rather than having them unlinked by default - it would be better.

This might be the reason why you can not link duplicated products to external data - on the other hand, internally the linked product stuff is more than a little bit complicated and so maybe it is a bug.

BTW: I have just noticed that if you delete a product duplicate, the little red kiss (of death) that is normally displayed over the icon when you mark an item as purged is not properly visible.

Cheers,

[nickcoleman]

Thanks for the reply. The internal linking issue you described is also a problem for us - we expected a duplicate product fields to be updated when the "master" version was changed as the main use for this feature is to have the same product appear in different places in the website (we use the feature for ink jet printer cartridges, where one cartridge fits many printers, and the prices of the cartridges constantly changes). Is this a bug, or an unavoidable side effect of the way duplicates have been implemented?

[Jan]

Is this a bug, or an unavoidable side effect of the way duplicates have been implemented?

Actually it is a feature - thinking back I remember being told that this was being done to allow people to have their duplicates slightly different in different parts of the catalog, ie. different titles, different templates etc.

Chris, is this how it is going to continue to work are you going to change it - if you are are going to leave it as it is I will add a free (probably free anyway - I'll have to check with the boss) program to my library to allow changes to be propogated for duplicates.

Thinking about your original problem, do you find that there is no menu option to duplicate a product that is linked to external data - if this is the case then you might be able to setup the duplicates and then link the data.

Regards,

[cdicken]

Chris, is this how it is going to continue to work are you going to change it - if you are are going to leave it as it is I will add a free (probably free anyway - I'll have to check with the boss) program to my library to allow changes to be propogated for duplicates.

It is working as designed. The duplicates feature maintains prices and stock levels between a linked product and its duplicates - but no other fields are kept up to date dynamically.

[mike@rfsl]

I have just run up against this problem after linking my products to an external sql database.

It doesn't look like its working properly to me.
If I duplicate a linked product then it copies over the correct data and maintains the dynamic data fields,
But then if I modify one of my unlinked fields on the duplicate, such as the "info. link" field then the dynamic fields (price and stock) also change.
eg.
Unlinked I had 0 stock for a part, i linked it to the external db and it changed to 271.
I duplicated the part and it copied the stock level of 271 over.
I changed the info text on the duplicate and the stock on the duplicate also changed to 0!

So it looks like the data fields are reverting to their previous 'unlinked' values.

It also seems that the duplicates only update if they are made after the original product has been linked.

[mike@rfsl]

Its not as bad as I thought originally. When the site is uploaded the correct dynamic data values are uploaded.

So it is only within Actinic that the wrong data is shown and I can just ignore this.

[AlanBrown]

It is working as designed. The duplicates feature maintains prices and stock levels between a linked product and its duplicates - but no other fields are kept up to date dynamically.

A useful feature would be an option to globally update ALL duplicates with the data in the original products. There could be an "on/off" button so any duplicates which needed alternative text can be excluded.

Duplicates are a good solution for us and we use them extensively, however remembering where they all are when we want to amend a product description is not easy.

Please add this to a "wish list".

Thanks

[cdicken]

A good suggestion. I have added it to the wish list for consideration.

[Tim Weaver]

May I echo my support for this feature as well?

Perhaps there could be an option on each duplicate product to enable/disable "link all fields", which could be coupled with a "push automatic update" option with each originating product?

[all-wall]

Yes, this would be a great feature to add to the wishlist

All-Wall.com is developing a macro that will update all product duplicates with a click of a button. This will assure that all duplicates get changed when a master product is updated, saving you the manual hunt for all duplicates.

[Jan]

We have our product duplicates update program for V7 in beta now, let me know if you would like a copy.

Regards,