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Product Edit "Found 0 items, showing 101 to 0"
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Post Product Edit "Found 0 items, showing 101 to 0" 
I’m using agora.cgi 5.2.003. I found one other old post on this problem but it didn’t offer any help. I’ve got roughly 2000 items in my store. Several categories have more than 100 items. When I try to use the “Product Edit” or “Product Delete” functions in the Manager 5.2.004 one of the categories with more than 100 items does not function properly. When I try to go to the ‘next’ group of 100 items it responds with “Found 0 items, showing 101 to 0 “. When I try to “Display All Items in All Categories” it displays several pages of 100 items and then chokes at about 700 where it displays a completely blank page below the header. other categories with more than 100 items work just fine. Apparently something is causing the problem. What sort of problem am I looking for? Everything seems to work fine in the store itself.

I have one other question. Could someone please give me a simple English definition for “PAD LENGTH”. I’ve looked over all the documentation I can find, but while it is referenced it is never defined. I don’t know if it is related (because I really am not sure what “PAD LENGTH” means) but some of my Product IDs are up to 14 characters long.

http://www.ravencues.com/cgi-bin/webstore/agora.cgi

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Post My test site gives a slightly different error? 
Under the same circumstances my test site displays "<a href="manager.cgi?change_" . That's it. The rest of the page is blank. The url line in my browser shows "http://www.ravencues.com/test/webstore/protected/manager.cgi?edit_screen=yes&category=Cues&first=301" if that is of any benefit.

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well...
the easy one first. pad length is the minium number of characters decided by you that any given product id must have. this is necessary for proper sorting when dealong with whole numbers. it also help to reduct the possibility of mistaking two similar numbers. not sure if this is a good example but close; 1234 and 12345 can be seen as the same product id if the matching ends with 4 characters. so the first one encountered will be displayed. however, if you pad numbers they will not only sort correctly but 111 and 11 will not be even close to being confused. if you pad by 5 characters (default) then 1234 will become 01234 and 111 and 11 will become 00111 and 00011 respectively. so for a more unique identity for product ids padding is a good thing, especially when dealing with money and other factors like shipping and tax. you con't want the shipping bot to find a 500 pound gorilla when the client is buying tweedy bird.

as for the products. 2000 products is a lot to have and still have an error free dB. if your dB is corrupted for some reason then the manager can freak out. especially when trying to display by categories or another particular field.
how does the front end look? have you navigated around your store?
how did you input your dB, by import or add items one by one through the store manager?
d

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Post The front end looks and works fine. 
Dan;

Thank you. I kinda, sorta thought that is what pad length meant but now I think I understand it better now. It does not mean (if my pad length is set to 7) only the first 7 characters of a 14 character ID will be recognized. It means all IDs will have at least 7 characters, so a 4 character ID will be preceded by 000. Do I understand it correctly? Where exactly does this occur? The data.file doesn’t show 0s in the IDs.

My database was created by standardizing several different supplier spreadsheets. I then merged them and saved as a CSV file that was imported to the data.file. The front end looks and works fine. I just added 600 or so new items today and those haven’t been thoroughly checked in the live store but they were in the test environment before I added them.

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yep you have the pad length correct. if developing in excel use the xls format, highlight column A and format the product id column as custom, and type in as many 0's as you need for pad length. excel should pad just fine.
or log in to the manager and go to the main settings and set up your pad length. then click on the dB manager link and click update pad length and image tags.

before you do either of these thing be sure to backup your data.file before updating. setting pad lenght and/or updating imge tags can have adverse results if doing custom things.



make a copy of your data.file and rename to data.file.txt then upload someplace. pm me with the link and i'll take a look at the structure for you.
d

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Post It may take a day or two 
Dan;

Again, thank you. I've got to complete another project before I can follow your suggestion but I will.

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Post Product Edit still crashes 
I typically use the Open Office scalc but I do have a version of Excel. Scalc doesn’t have the ‘custom’ option but it has a similar function. I followed your instructions in excel. I used the similar function in scalc and I used the Update Pad length function with a setting of 7. I had to use that function in my test site because, for some reason, when I use that update in the real store it always terminates in an Internal Server Error 500. it still didn’t add 0s to anything in the test site. No matter what I did I couldn’t find any evidence of 0s being added to the Product Ids. Product Edit didn’t show them, the spreadsheets didn’t show them and a text editor inspection of the data.file didn’t show them. I even re-imported the database by using “Update key padding with leading zeros (product db, others if so defined)”. Where else could the 0s be? The Product Edit and the Product Delete functions still crash.

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when you get in the thousands of products you can experience server time outs when importing and exporting and doing other massive dB functions. so do everything through your spread sheet except after uploading the data.file you must open the manager and edit 1 product. don't make any changes just open the edit window and submit. this will rebuild your links and subcats.

as for pid padding... for the benefit of those reading this thread, here is what i wrote in the pm...

Quote:
what i did...
i replaced the ampersands in the category name with N

i padded the product id to seven zeros. this is a numeric thing and whole numbers only. so any pid with letters (most) or numbers with a dash (some) wont get padded. only the whole numbers will and there are but a few.

i added the %%OPTION%%blank.html token to all blank option fields

i formatted the price column numerically to two 0's after the period.

most importantly, when i imported your file into excel the product weight column was missing so i added it. now there are the proper number of columns required and the data is all in the proper place.


so give er a whirl and see if that doesn't fix your issues.
d

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Post Oops! 
Oops! I was hoping you would look at the file and let me know if there was anything wrong with it but I didn’t expect you were actually going to do anything too it. I really do appreciate what you did but I’ve been merrily adding dozens of new items and making hundreds of edits for misspellings and typos. I’ve changed prices and options and so on and so on. My stuff has changed a lot since I made the data.file.txt.

In a way this is a good thing. Once again I really do appreciate what you did but I am the sort of person who learns best by doing. I’ve looked at the file you edited. I immediately see it is structurally different. While I can’t just upload it to my active store I can, and will, upload it to my test store. That way I can examine everything. You gave a good explanation of what you did so I should be able to follow everything. I will let you know how things go.

I’m not sure why you did all the things you did but I expect at least most of it will become apparent as I delve into this further. I do everything I know how to offline and just upload when I’m ready but you indicate that I can actually make my data.file from my spreadsheet. I’ve been uploading a CSV file and Importing it through the Manager. Then I’ve downloaded the data.file, replaced the underscores with spaces and uploaded it again. How do I go about creating the data.file without using the Manager?

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well first of all if you send me your latest greatest dB i'll fix any errors i find. there is at least one subcat that is misspelled. that sticks out like a sore thumb on every page LOL.
the xls file has a macro in it which allows you to save as a plain text pipe delimited file which you can name as data.file on export. when you do that the file becomes exactly what the agora data file needs (native format).
so if you can use xls then you can use that file as your developing file and export as needed.
i usually advise ppl not to use the manager to edit, add or remove products if they're using excel to maintin their dB. it gets too confusing and can lead to errors trying to keep the dB and the dev file synced.
d

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Post Ok. Thanks for the info 
Ok. Thanks for the info on the subcat and the specifics on how to create the data.file. Both are appreciated. I also appreciate the offer to fix any errors but I’d much rather do that myself. I think it helps me keep everything straight and prevent future problems.

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no prob.
first thing to check is that there are 13 columns in the dB no more no less. all row cells must be active. they can be empty (except the product_id) but they cannot be null. so for each product you must have 13 cells or fields.
the option field is always last. even in the 10 ans 20 user versions.
user1 is the beginning of the userfields and that is column or cell 8. so column/cell 8 thru 12 are the five userfields.
be sure to check that even though your dB has 13 columns that all rows have a cell for each column. otherwise when exporting to any delimiter you will end up with missing cells in the middle of the dB which can be very hard to recognize when viewing in a plain text viewer.
d

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Post It isn't fixed but it is better! 
Ok. My spreadsheet Db has 13 columns (A-M). A, B, C, D, E, F, H and I all have data in each cell. Column J doesn’t have any data in it so that one is there but blank. G, K, L and M have data in some cells but not in others. The data in column G is not used by the program in any way. It contains the information I used to create the option files. I just sort of kept the info there, but since I wasn’t using the ship by weight stuff I didn’t think it would matter. M, the last column, contains the options files. All columns have a cell in each row.

In my latest version of the Db I deleted all information in column G to see if that would correct my problem but it did not. I also removed the ampersands from the category and subcategory names. I just replaced them with ‘and’. I had the space to work with. That didn’t make the problem go away either, but I did seem to do something. I have 8 categories with more than 100 products. I was able to use Product Edit to navigate through all but the one that has 752 products. But even so I was able to get to 400. After 400 the page just turns white below the header. That is better than it was.

In re-reading the things you did to the data.file you re-worked for me you said you added the weight column because it wasn’t there. That is column G and it has always been there, but some of my product descriptions are so long it might have been difficult to tell it was there. The data that was in column G was also pretty far down the list. I would still really like to look at the data.file you re-worked in my spreadsheet. Could you possibly tell me how to get it back into a format that will line it up into spreadsheet columns again? I can open the file in all sorts of programs (including the spreadsheet) but I can’t look at it column by column.

Must I have something in all the currently blank option cells?

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the xls file i sent you is exactly what the data.file has in it. however you can make a new excel file and import the data.file contents following this example...
create a new excel file. click on Data=>Get External Data=>Import Text File
navigate to the folder you need then change the "files of type" to "all files".
click on the file you want to import. by default the next window should be "delimited", "start at first row" and have a sample view showing data delimited with pipes.
click "next". uncheck any delimiters that are checked then check the "other" checkbox. enter a pipe (shift+backslash). do not add any spaces or other character(s). just a pipe. you should see the data view change in the sample window to display columns. for "text qualifier" select {none} then click finish. one more window may appear with a formula in it... select "existing worksheet" and it should already have... =$A$1 if not put it in. click "ok" and the data will appear in the worksheet.
i have excel 2000 so any other version maybe somewhat different... or not.
d

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oh. one more thing

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oops hit the wrong key stroke Laughing
if you are exporting to csv then uploading and importing the csv through the manager the server maybe timing out or corruption due to interruption maybe happening. try to break up the database into 500 or so products per csv then import using the append service. the first one should probably be overwite entire dB then for subsequent imports do the append thing until the entire dB is imported.
this is not an agoracart issue. it is the server trying to protect you and other ppl on the server from runaway scripts and crackers. so scripts time out.
d

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Post I still get to 400 items and it chokes going to 500. 
I’m no longer letting the program convert the CSV file to the data.file. Now that I know how to do it myself I’m making the data.file and uploading it. I do the ‘Edit one item’ thing to be sure.

Ok. I’ve got good news and bad news. Once you told me how to do it I could easily look at the data.file you reworked as a spreadsheet. There was indeed an additional column that shifted the user data to the right one column. When I removed the additional column and uploaded the file to my test environment everything lined up correctly again. The bad news is that did not correct the problem. I still get to 400 items and it chokes going to 500. What is really interesting however is I have another category that has 461 items and I can get entirely through it with ‘Product Edit’.

So, at this point, things are better but this is what I get when I try to go to 500 items’ <a href="manager.cgi?change_ ‘.

Where do we go from here?

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so you're saying my xls and therefore my data.file had 14 columns? Shocked
if that's the case then oops, my bad. be sure to check that, please.
i'll look into the manager to see if there is a limitation on products to display.
one question, i suppose. if you're using a spreadsheet and successfully maintaining your dB updates with it then why use the manager for anything but generating a new link list?
d

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Post The answer to a very good question. 
Yep. There was an extra column, but I can easily see why. I wasn’t using the column for its purpose. I was just sort of storing information there.

You asked a good question. When I started this thread I was still using the manager to do occasional quick edits. I didn’t know I could create the data.file myself so I made the quick edits, changed my CSV file each time, eventually uploaded it when there were enough changes to make and let the Manager create the data.file. Then I downloaded the data.file removed all the underscores and uploaded it again. The process was somewhat laborious but it worked and I didn’t know there was an easier way. I have you to thank for the process is much simpler now.

To be honest I probably won’t use the manager for edits nearly as often. It still is faster for the small stuff, but I am still pursuing this because ‘If it supposed to work… I want it to work’. You know when I can see something isn’t working like it should work I wonder what else isn’t working like it should?

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absolutely. and if one has 10000 products then the manager should be able to administer the products and as far as i know it does... or did. there have been massive changes to the store in general and the manager too in recent months. so if anyone has 2000 or more products and the edit, add and delete products screens mess up then please post. if anyone has a viable, error free dB they would like to offer as a test dB then please let me know. i'll run the store through it's paces myself and submit any problems to mr ed for review. but, the dB has to be absolutely error free as i don't have time to go over it with a fine toothed comb. thousands of products error free... am i dreaming? grin
also, fyi i am working on a tool to check images for large databases. a 2000 product dB can have in excess of 6000 images. i personally don't want to click for each and every one to check. so i'm developing a program that will do it for me. i have it working for the main product image and it checks for proper path, image folder by name and matches the image name in the dB to the image name in the folder (case sensitive). it works pretty slick so far. i have to add for the small image and the popup. i have run it locally and on a client's live site and it found over 20 missing images. by "missing" i mean either the image does not exist in the expected folder or the image name is mispelled in the dB or file name or there is a case sensitive issue. all of which can cause an image not to display. Cool
i have more tools in the works too.
d

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