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Prestashop duplicate products error

The admin tool for Prestashop is slick, but the pure ajax pages slows me down when pages have to refresh. One good thing about zencart was that I could modify attributes without having to load other information about the products. Plus, I could switch from one product to another very easily.

As soon as I add an attribute to a product, like telling the system that I want to sell the mask in blue, the system has to reload a lot of information. So, there’s always a pause before I can add another color mask. It would have been been nice to take an existing product and just duplicate it a few times since practically all the masks have the same colors. Unfortunately, the duplicate product feature isn’t working for me, and I wind up with a “an error occurred while creating object” error message.

It duplicates the product in the “ps_products” and “ps_products_lang” tables, but not in the important “ps_category_product”, “ps_product_attribute” and “ps_product_attribute_combinations” tables. The ps_category_product table is easy to modify and there’s very little needed to get the product into the table. I’ve figured out the other two tables, but they require a little coordination. I’m going to try skipping that routine tonight and try the product attribute import feature. I hope that will make things easier. I really ought to import products to speed things up!

update:
Well, the import of attributes worked once I realized that the fields were separated by semi-colons. I should have figured that out sooner, but when the tool says to import a CSV file, that notion gets confusing. A comma separated file implies that fields are separated by commas! So, I had to load my CSV file in Excel and search/replace the commas to be semi-colons.

So, the import did work, but one problem is that it duplicates options in the database. I don’t need more than one “blue” attribute in the database. It would be nice if it I could have provided the id value for blue instead of it creating a new attribute. So, this isn’t going to work for me.

The answer is straight database hacking inserts for now … The ps_product_attribute table is only important to me for 3 fields: id_product_attribute (auto_increment), id_product, and default_on. So, my insert will just be
“insert into ps_product_attribute (id_product, default_on) values (126, 0)”, and I’ll run that statement for each attribute I want to insert for a product. For the first attribute, I’ll change that 0 to a 1 to designate it as the default attribute. All this does is tell the database that I want to create an attribute for the product, and it produces a primary key id_product_attribute that I’ll use to actually specify what the attribute is.

So, in the “ps_product_attribute_combination” table, I will run
“insert into ps_product_attribute_combination (id_attribute, id_product_attribute) values (75, 245)” where the 75 is the id value for blue attribute, and the 245 is the primary key I just created. If I do this properly, I should be able to have a file with all the insert statements and just run through it all at once. As long as I keep my primary keys in order, this should work. Heh, if it doesn’t work, I’ll have to add an another update to this post!