Flat File Delete Products and Variants

[elcucococo]

Hello,

Can anyone recommend a technique or module to bulk delete products from Miva 9 via a flat file (CSV)?

Ideally, I would like to provide Miva with a flat file of product codes (containing a mixture of products and product variants) to be deleted from my store.

Any suggestions?

I tried searching Miva forums first for the answer, but got a list of threads with outdated Miva modules. Has this feature been incorporated into Miva 9?

Thank you for your help!

[sbronstad]

Re: Flat File Delete Products and Variants

This is kind-of old-school, but if you can do it by doing a product import with two fields: prod_code and name.

Prod_code is all the products you want to delete; replace name field with "XXX" or some other unique string that won't pull in something else (like, that totally won't work if you're running a p*rno site).

After the import, view the products that contain "XXX"-- select all-- Delete!

[Brennan]

Re: Flat File Delete Products and Variants

Why do you need it to be via a CSV?

In version 9 you can easily bulk select a list and delete the products quickly.

Im not sure there is going to be a great way via s csv, but there is also an XML way which may be useful. Just need to understand why it needs to be in a text file.

[jsisk]

Re: Flat File Delete Products and Variants

Brennan, we could use the same feature. Here is our situation:

Our database has about 25,000 items. Of these, over 95% are one of a kind. A few thousand are out of stock, and will be restocked at some point. (so we can't delete everything with a quantity of zero) Every day we do a "Delete Sheet" to out of stock all one of a kind items that sold as well as any non-one of a kind items that sold out, but will be restocked. Because we allow customers 30 days to return an item for a refund, we can't delete items when they sell - we have to out of stock them. An average month results in a few hundred items that need to be deleted that were previously marked out of stock and did not get returned, but there is no realistic way in Miva to find them, so the database continues to grow. Over time we end up with thousands of items that are sold and will not be back in stock (one of a kind) mixed in with items that just sold recently and can't be deleted.

Our point of sale system will allow us to run a report (that can be exported to Excel) of all items in a particular department (that contains only one of a kind items) that sold at least 30 days ago (to exclude items still eligible for return). Takes about a minute or two.

To be able to import this spreadsheet and delete those items would be great. For now, the database just continues to grow.

[Brennan]

Re: Flat File Delete Products and Variants

Got it. You should be able to do with using our XML provisioning format. It has a product delete tag:

<Product_Delete Code="test" />

You should be able to setup an excel sheet and use the Concatenate function to build this XML file for you with all the delete tags.

This would then be imported under Data Management using the "Import Data and Settings in XML Provisioning Format"

[elcucococo]

Re: Flat File Delete Products and Variants

Got it. You should be able to do with using our XML provisioning format. It has a product delete tag:

<Product_Delete Code="test" />

You should be able to setup an excel sheet and use the Concatenate function to build this XML file for you with all the delete tags.

This would then be imported under Data Management using the "Import Data and Settings in XML Provisioning Format"

Scott,
Thank you for your tip! I will definitely give that a try!

Brennan,
Thank you for your advice about the XML provisioning format. I will definitely give that a try, too! Thank you for the awesome fast response time!!! :))

[elcucococo]

Re: Flat File Delete Products and Variants

Got it. You should be able to do with using our XML provisioning format. It has a product delete tag:

<Product_Delete Code="test" />

You should be able to setup an excel sheet and use the Concatenate function to build this XML file for you with all the delete tags.

This would then be imported under Data Management using the "Import Data and Settings in XML Provisioning Format"

Brennan,

Thank you for your help and advice with the XML format.

I see the above you specified the XML format for deleting products. Can you tell me how I setup the header and footer to the XML format file? I tried searching Google, Miva 9 Guide, and within Miva 9 'Data Management > Import Settings' for a template file, but I could not find one.

Thanks a lot!

Carlos

[elcucococo]

Re: Flat File Delete Products and Variants

After the import, view the products that contain "XXX"-- select all-- Delete!

Scott,

Your solution was easy and well explained. Thank you for your assistance!

[lesliekirk]

Re: Flat File Delete Products and Variants

Got it. You should be able to do with using our XML provisioning format. It has a product delete tag:

<Product_Delete Code="test" />

You should be able to setup an excel sheet and use the Concatenate function to build this XML file for you with all the delete tags.

This would then be imported under Data Management using the "Import Data and Settings in XML Provisioning Format"

Is this still the only way to mass delete products via an import file? I have over 200 products that can't easily be deleted from the batch list unless maybe I created a custom field called Delete and used it to sort by. That might work since I have the products exported. I would just have to add the field, import, the sort by that field in the batch list.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

That would be one way. Another would be to assign them to a 'delete' category, then export in XML provisioning format (Name only field selected), then just search and replace 'Product_Add>' with 'Product_Delete>' and upload to the Miva admin directory.

[lesliekirk]

At this point, it seems to be "easiest" to delete them from the Product batch list as long as a common search term can find what is needed. Something that has been noticed though is the time it seems to be taking to delete them. The store owner reported that took 3 minutes to delete 4 of the 355 products he selected for deletion.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Sounds like a cache issue. Have them run the 'clear cache' feature after updating a batch of products.

[lesliekirk]

There may be something else going on with the site - just opened a support ticket.

[Leanne]

How are you all handling the removal of images associated with deleted products? I have a site that currently has 430 products to be deleted, and also has an extremely bloated graphics/00000001 folder that needs to be cleaned up. I'm leery of the Delete Unreferenced Images feature of Image Machine Management. How does it handle images that may be used in category headers or elsewhere on the site?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Not sure about the 'Delete Unreferenced Images" feature either, but if you can generate the list of associated images, either by export or looping through the actual product runtime list (PLST), then either using the legacy images reference or the ImageMachine reference function, locate the removed products images and us the "sdelete(filename)" function.

I remember setting up a semi-automated version of this for a client, where we had them use an import to set the products to be 'in-active' and then use an SMT script on a hidden page to first, run through all un-activated products, then delete images, and then delete the product.