Changes to part numbers

[MEost]

My company supplies office products and we work closely with HP and Canon etc. Our Actinic site is linked directly to an external database that controls pricing.

Unfortunately some of the manufacturers have developed a habit for changing the part number (product ref) of products. If we change the part number of an item it breaks the link to Actinic but this can be repaired (ideally Actinic would recognise the change and do this automatically). However the more serious problem I'd like to overcome is that if a customer has the item saved on their shopping list this causes an error page when they recall the list. They then have to relocate the item and add it back onto their shooping list.

Does anybody know how to get around this

Our site is currently running on V6 and we are in the process of upgrading to V7

[Jan]

I don't think that you can do anything about this. Actinic use the product reference as the database key and so if it changes then there is no way of linking the new reference to the old one. It would be better to have a unique id for each product that never changes and then to have the product reference as a text field.

To get around this in the past I have stored the old product reference in one of the opaque tax fields and then had a program check the value I stored against the current value and then had the program automatically update my external database with the new reference if the Actinic product reference has changed.

I don't see how you can get around this in saved baskets because they are stored on the users PC rather than yours and you don't have any access to them.

Regards,