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Chimerastudio
Registered Member

Date Joined Aug 2007
Total Posts : 27

Posted 2/6/2010 2:31 PM (GMT -4)

We are having a terrible problem with products disappearing from category list pages, although they are still showing as being added to the category in the admin, and are still showing up through a search for that specific product. This has been happening over a period of two weeks and we keep scrambling to add them back in, usually by deleting the product and remaking it. Fortunately, the site is not live yet.

Might this be to the same server memory issues as mentioned in the previous posting (All Payment Options Dissappeared for an hour (SP3))

The categories are static, and we are on a dedicated server. We have about 3000 products entered so far.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Shelly Gardner-Alley
www.papermojo.com

Post Edited (Chimerastudio) : 2/6/2010 1:40:18 PM (GMT-5)

Aaron
BVC Expert

Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 1026

Posted 2/6/2010 11:04 PM (GMT -4)

Are you tracking inventory on the products? If so, it's possible that your inventory quantity is 0 and the product inventory mode is set to 'remove from store' when your inventory is depleted. Just a thought...

Aaron Sherrick
Develisys Web smart. Market savvy.
Tel 717-566-9455 - Toll free 866-674-4770
www.develisys.com

Chimerastudio
Registered Member

Date Joined Aug 2007
Total Posts : 27

Posted 2/7/2010 12:06 AM (GMT -4)

Aaron,

Looks like you are right. Although it seems the majority of our products have "Show as out of stock (allow orders)" assigned to them, it looks like those that have disappeared from the category list pages do have the property "remove from store" assigned to them. When we remade them, it picked up our default inventory mode, which is the "Show as out of stock (allow orders)"

I guess there is no way to globally change all the existing products, is there? Maybe we can change all there inventory levels to 0 and see what disappears. It's a lot of products to check but I guess it's the only way

Thanks again, Aaron!

Shelly Gardner-Alley
www.papermojo.com

Chimerastudio
Registered Member

Date Joined Aug 2007
Total Posts : 27

Posted 2/7/2010 10:13 AM (GMT -4)

In changing all the inventory levels to 0, we have lost the display of 75% of our products in the category lists. So I guess that was the problem. There doesn't seem to be any end to the mess our developer has left us with. At one point I know they were all showing with 0 inventory levels, as the inability to change the levels from 0 to a positive value was one of the problems we asked them to correct. (to explain, we show inventory levels to our customers)

I have found a column called "OutOfStockMode" in the bvc_ProductInventory table. The value entered there universally for each product is "0" which seems to agree with the value of the "Remove from Store" option for out of stock display. But changing it to "2", the value for "Show as Out of Stock (Allow Orders)" has no effect on the product display. So I'm obviously looking in the wrong place. I think so, as there should be some variation in the values because the new products we've added have the correct setting.

Is there another way I can more quickly alter the out of stock display settings? I'd really like to avoid manually altering 2500 products.

Shelly Gardner-Alley
www.papermojo.com

Aaron
BVC Expert

Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 1026

Posted 2/7/2010 6:04 PM (GMT -4)

OK, setting the OutOfStockMode field is a good thing to do. However, if you don't want to track inventory on your products, you will need to set the "TrackInventory" field to "0" (my guess is that it's set to "1"). Also, make sure the Status column set to "1".

Aaron Sherrick
Develisys Web smart. Market savvy.
Tel 717-566-9455 - Toll free 866-674-4770
www.develisys.com

Chimerastudio
Registered Member

Date Joined Aug 2007
Total Posts : 27

Posted 2/7/2010 8:39 PM (GMT -4)

Yes, we do need to track inventory, especially as we show our inventory levels with the product info to our customers. But we allow customers to order more than we have in stock (in the majority of cases) because they are often doing large jobs and we can't afford to keep hundreds of each type of paper in stock.

But setting the OutOfStockMode field to 2 is having no effect on the visibility of the products. They are still missing from the category pages. The Status column is set to "1" in most cases. I'm guessing those few that are set to "0" are products we've deactivated for one reason or another. Is that what the Status field signifies?

Shelly Gardner-Alley
www.papermojo.com

Aaron
BVC Expert

Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 1026

Posted 2/8/2010 1:45 AM (GMT -4)

That's my understanding of the OutOfStockMode. Since that's not what you're seeing I'm either incorrect or there is another problem; either way I wouldn't know without digging into some code.

Yes, that is what the Status field signifies.

Aaron Sherrick
Develisys Web smart. Market savvy.
Tel 717-566-9455 - Toll free 866-674-4770
www.develisys.com

Chimerastudio
Registered Member

Date Joined Aug 2007
Total Posts : 27

Posted 2/8/2010 11:44 AM (GMT -4)

My gut instinct is that our developer wrote some quick code to force the products to show without taking the time to set them up in a valid way. We've tried very hard to remove the tentacles of the bad code, but it is obviously still haunting us. Let me try to rip out a few more things...

Shelly Gardner-Alley
www.papermojo.com

Chimerastudio
Registered Member

Date Joined Aug 2007
Total Posts : 27

Posted 2/8/2010 12:57 PM (GMT -4)

OK, I found some DLLs in the bin directory that they had written. Once I removed them, the products appeared again as they were coded to with the "2" setting. So my next problem is.... they evidently never enabled inventory using the BV methods. The DLLs were altering that behavior too. It that the "TrackInventory" column you were referring to? Which table might I find that column in?

Shelly Gardner-Alley
www.papermojo.com

Aaron
BVC Expert

Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 1026

Posted 2/8/2010 1:13 PM (GMT -4)

Shelly,

"TrackInventory" is in the bvc_Product table. Additionally, you will want to check the store-wide inventory setting in the Options tab (Options --> Inventory).

Aaron Sherrick
Develisys Web smart. Market savvy.
Tel 717-566-9455 - Toll free 866-674-4770
www.develisys.com

Chimerastudio
Registered Member

Date Joined Aug 2007
Total Posts : 27

Posted 2/8/2010 4:47 PM (GMT -4)

I was completely wrong. I spoke too soon. The majority of the products are not back showing in the category list pages. Changing the OutOfStockMode to 2 and removing the custom DLLs did nothing to solve the problem. There must be some custom code elsewhere that is interrupting the action of the OutOfStockMode setting. I guess we're gonna have to modify all 2500 products individually

Shelly Gardner-Alley
www.papermojo.com

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